Coyote Blog

I am not sure this even needs an introduction.  Comparisons to "1984" are invoked in political discourse almost as much as those to Nazi Germany, and most are overblown, but the George Orwell novel is all I can think of when I see this:

It may be almost 2007, but it feels more like "1984" at Michigan
State University. The university's Student Accountability in Community
Seminar (SAC) forces students whose speech or behavior is deemed
unacceptable to undergo ideological reeducation at their own expense.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is challenging
Michigan State to dismantle this unconstitutional program, which
presents a profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of
conscience.

 

"Michigan State's SAC program is simply one of the most invasive
attempts at reeducation that FIRE has ever seen, yet it has been
allowed to exist at the university for years," FIRE President Greg
Lukianoff said. "As bad as it is to tell citizens in a free society
what they can't say, it is even worse to tell them what they must
say. Michigan State's program is an immoral and unconstitutional
program of compelled speech, blatant thought reform, and
pseudo-psychology."

 

According to the program's materials,
SAC is an "early intervention" for students who use such
"power-and-control tactics" as "male/white privilege" and
"obfuscation," which the university cryptically defines as "any action
of obscuring, concealing, or changing people's perceptions that result
in your advantage and/or another's disadvantage." Students can be
required to attend SAC if they demonstrate what a judicial
administrator arbitrarily deems aggressive behavior, past examples of
which have included slamming a door during an argument or playing a
practical joke. Students can also be required to attend SAC for
engaging in various types of constitutionally protected speech,
including "insulting instructors" or "making sexist, homophobic, or
racist remarks at a meeting." When participation in SAC is required,
"non-compliance typically results in a hold being placed on the
student's account," an action that leaves the student unable to
register for classes and thus effectively expelled from the university.
Students are required to pay the cost of the SAC sessions.

 

Once in the program, students are instructed to answer a series of
written questionnaires. In their answers, students must specifically
describe how they are taking "full responsibility" for their offensive
behavior and must do so using language that the director of the session
deems acceptable. Most students will be asked to fill out this
questionnaire multiple times, slowly inching closer to what
administrators deem to be "correct" responses.

PC indoctrination at our nation's universities is alive and well.  It just astounds me that a group of adults thought this was acceptable.

There have been a number of articles of late about college admissions and Asians.  For example, my alma mater Princeton is getting sued by a young man who says the school's admissions standards are discriminatory against Asians  (he was forced to go to Yale instead, which in my mind represents substantial pain and suffering).  David Bernstein at Volokh also had this:

Liming Luo is a high school senior who is both a math prodigy and received a perfect 2,400 score on her SATs.  New York Magazine
asked Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of IvyWise, a school-admissions
consulting company, about her [and other students'] prospects for
admission to MIT, the college of her choice. The answer:

Her perfect SAT score is truly outstanding but not a free ticket.
She is applying to many technical colleges, so she will be competing
against a lot of other high-achieving math/science kids (and a lot of other Asian students in particular). While she may be admitted to MIT early, I am not convinced she's a shoo-in"”I'd want to see more evidence that she's giving back to the community.

I don't know enough to comment on the Asian issues, but I wanted to make a couple of other points.  First, Bernstein is probably correct in wondering why there is such a focus on "giving back to the community" for an 18-year old girl who appears to be a math genius.  But his question is naive.  I can say from experience that everything on an application for college may be negotiable (e.g. good athletics allows for lower SAT scores) except for community service.  That has become inviolable.  Every college prep school I know have elaborate programs nowadays to make sure their kids get lots of community service hours.  My son, at the age of eleven, missed on his first shot at National Junior Honor Society because he only had about 20 hours of community service.  I can tell you that for college-bound high school kids, community service is longer about volunteering and giving back but about grimly checking off one of the most important boxes for college applications.

My other thought is that you don't have to be Asian to worry nowadays that near-perfect SAT's and grades are not enough to get one into the Ivy League.  As you can see here, placing in the 99th percentile on SAT's only gives one a 1 in 5 shot at getting in to Princeton.  The other thing you can see is that top Ivy's are being honest when they say they want more than just good grades -- you can see at Princeton and Harvard that moving from 91st to 99th percentile on SAT's does little to improve a person's prospect of getting in.  (On the Asian discrimination issue, that means that more than half of the kids in the top 1 percentile of SAT's will get turned down by Princeton, and some of these will be Asians.  Whether that is discrimination or just brutally tough admissions is hard to say).

Which leads me to my main point -- the Ivy League needs to find a way to increase capacity.  The number of kids that are "ivy-ready" has exploded over the last decades, but the class sizes at Ivy schools have remained flat.    For years I have been campaigning at Princeton for this, and I am happy to see they are increasing the class size, but only by a small amount.  Princeton has an endowment larger than the GNP of most countries.  To date, it has spent that money both well and poorly.  Well, because Princeton is one of just a handful of schools that guarantee that if you get in, they will make sure you can pay for it, and they do it with grants, leaving every student debt free at graduation.  Poorly, because they have been overly focused on increasingly what I call the "educational intensity" or the amount of physical plant and equipment and stuff per student.  In this latter case, we have got to be near the limit of spending an incremental $10 million to increase the education quality by .01%.  We should instead be looking for ways to offer this very high quality of education to more people, since so many more are qualified today.

By the way, one of the reasons Ivy League schools don't take my advice is because of the faculty.  The very first thing that the faculty wants is more endowed chairs, more equipment, more office space, etc.  The very last thing most faculty wants is more students that would force them to actually teach more rather than publish and do research.

Postscript:  OK, I will make one comment about the Asian kids thing.  I don't know if what Ivy admissions offices are doing is discriminatory or not.  But I do know that among the white parents of college-bound high school students that I know, there is real undercurrent of anti-Asian resentment.  I can't tell you how often I hear stuff like "Oh of course he does well, he's Asian" or "I don't know if my kid can get into X, all the Asian kids get the spots."  Its a strange, resentful sort of racism I see all the time from parents who would never be caught dead uttering anything untoward about blacks.  There is this funny feeling I get in some of these conversations that it's OK to dislike Asians in a way that would never be perceived as OK for blacks.

As a follow-on to this post on public vs. private schools, I saw this via Neal McCluskey at Cato:

District officials, as well as the president of the
teachers union, bristle at assertions by the Charter Schools
Association that middle and high school charters are significantly
outperforming their district counterparts.

A fairer comparison would be with the district's magnet schools,
which outperform charters, school board member Jon Lauritzen said.

"I think it's basically unfair to compare an entity that is able to
take their entire budget and focus it entirely on their own schools,"
he said. "They have some real advantages over our schools in the
flexibility of actually providing the type of education that a
particular community wants, whereas we are trying to provide a
curriculum that works for everyone all across the school district."

This last paragraph is hilarious on its face.   The average parent must wonder what Mr. Lauritzen is doing with the public school funds in contrast to focusing his entire budget at, you know, the schools, like those evil competitors do.  And what government official would ever be caught dead providing the type of serves that a particular community actually wants.  And this is all in the context that charter schools are, in McCluskey's words, a "pale shade of choice."

So, what does the teachers union and school board members do in the face of competition that they acknowledge works better?  Do they demand the same flexibility in spending and rules in their own schools?  No!  Of course not!  They demand that the schools that work better be eliminated:

It's no wonder that, a few months ago, Mr. Lauritzen proposed a
moratorium on charter schools, and that public schooling's defenders
fight even harder against reforms like vouchers and tax credits. After
all, who could just sit by and watch parents get schools they want when
an old, hopeless system is suffering?

The single post from way back that I still get the most Google hits from (and the most nasty email, I might add) was my post on the myth that public schools teachers are underpaid.  This was a follow-on post to my lengthy post fisking the NEA's school improvement plans and here too.  The premise in all these posts was that 1) Public schools actually spent more per pupil than private schools that do a better job and 2) Teachers, when you adjust their total hours to match other workers who don't get summers off, make a salary very competitive to other professionals, even before their hefty government benefits package.

The Goldwater Institute has just completed a study of Arizona private schools, and has come to many of the same conclusions.  The study's author, Andrew Coulson, summarizes the findings:

In a study released yesterday
by the Goldwater Institute, I analyze the results of their most recent
private school survey. Among the other fascinating findings is that
public schools spend one-and-a-half times as much per pupil as do
private schools. Or, looked at the other way, private schools spend a
third less than public schools.

Some other fascinating tidbits:

Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona's independent education sector, but less than half
of on-site staff in the public sector. In order to match the
independent sector's emphasis on teachers over non-teaching staff,
Arizona public schools would have to hire roughly 25,000 more teachers
and dismiss 21,210 non-teaching employees.

When teachers' 9-month salaries are annualized to make them
comparable to the 12-month salaries of most other fields, Arizona
independent school teachers earned the equivalent of $36,456 in 2004 "”
about $2,000 less than reporters and correspondents. The
12-month-equivalent salary of the state's public school teachers was
around $60,000, which is more than nuclear technicians,
epidemiologists, detectives, and broadcast news analysts. It's also
about 50 percent more than reporters or private school teachers earn.

My kids go to an absolutely fabulous private school here in Phoenix.  It is secular and (gasp) actually runs for-profit, so it has no endowments or sources of grants or charitable funds.  In exchange for a great education that far outstrips the quality of even the best local schools, it charges a tuition substantially less than the Phoenix-area per-pupil public school spending (and it offers a 20% discount for each child over one).  If you are considering a move to the area, email me and I will give you more detail.

More here on the virtues of school choice.  This is a sort of related post on the barriers to starting a private school.

"Shouldn't Princeton students have the same rights as their counterparts down the road at Mercer County Community College?"

Princeton is a private institution, and has a greater ability than state institutions to set its own codes of conduct for its students.  That being said, as one who wants Princeton to remain a strong institution, I don't understand what the university's interest is in limiting free speech.  Particularly booing at a play.  The only exception I might make to this are efforts to make sure that invited speakers or scheduled performances can actually be heard and aren't drowned out by protesters, but I don't get the sense that this is what is going on here.

This "unwanted verbal conduct" standard that a number of universities have adopted is absurd, and is only harming students by releasing them into the real world believing that the government will protect them from encountering any criticism.  In this sense, Princeton and other universities are creating students in the modern Islamic mold, teaching them they should somehow be immune to criticism and that they should react with rabid outrage at the first person who says anything negative about them.  The only difference is that these students are being taught to respond with lawyers rather than explosive backpacks, but the outcome in terms of stifled free speech is the same.

Baseball Crank reports:

In ... Gulino v. New York State Education Department (2d Cir. Aug. 17, 2006),
the Second Circuit reinstated a race discrimination suit against the
New York State Education Department based on the theory that a test of
"basic college-level content" that asks applicants to get just
two-thirds of the questions right is racially discriminatory because it
has a "disparate impact" on African-American and Latino teachers. The
test, developed in response to a 1988 task force report on problems with teacher quality, is described at pages 11-13 of the opinion.

There is nothing surprising, really, about this.  This theory, that a test that shows African-Americans performing more poorly than whites is by definition racist, has been floating around by decades.  It is particularly popular with various African-American leadership groups.

I have no problem with various ethnic and racial groups bringing expertise to bear to weed out poorly worded questions on exams.  But making this their only reaction to the test - ie the test shows we as a group may have a problem so lets throw the test out - is insane.  By way of explanation, here is a little play to consider:

Doctor:  I am sorry to tell you that you have cancer.  If untreated, it can be fatal.  The good news is that it is treatable, but the treatment will take time and can be quite difficult and painful.

Patient:  Your test is bad.  If other people don't have cancer, then I don't either.  I am going to ignore the result and ask the government to make sure that no one else is allowed to take the test either.

Doctor:  But that's crazy!  The cancer is treatable, but only if we get to work on it right now.

Patient:  You will be hearing from my lawyer for the pain and suffering your bad test has caused me.

I fully believe that the average African American wants her kids to be well educated, and has deep concerns about the quality of the education her kids are getting.  So I will limit my comments to African American "leadership".  Is what these leadership groups are doing in trying to legally strike down tests that show that the education they are getting as a group is failing really any different than a patient ignoring a positive cancer test?

Postscript:  In the article I linked, I do not share the author's concern about political T-shirts at school.

I am trying to picture the discussion in the Colorado legislature.  Our public schools are struggling, what should we do?

A Jefferson County geography teacher was placed on paid administrative
on the second day of school for hanging several flags from other
countries in his classroom.

Eric Hamlin said the flags were part
of a world geography lesson plan at Carmody Middle School and refused
to take them down. The school's principal escorted Hamlin out of class
Wednesday morning after he refused to remove the flags of China and
Mexico.

The school district placed him on administrative leave
for insubordination, citing a Colorado law that makes it illegal to
display foreign flags permanently in schools.

"Under state law, foreign flags can only be in the classroom because
it's tied to the curriculum. And the principal looked at the
curriculum, talked to the teacher, and found that there was really no
curriculum coming up in the next few weeks that supported those flags
being in the classroom," said Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Lynn
Setzer.

It all reminds me of this guy.  Colorado has elected a number of strong nativists to their public offices, and they have taken the lead in many anti-immigrant efforts (that's the nativists whose ancestors immigrated from Europe over the last couple of centuries, not the nativists who were actually, you know, here first).  I think its helpful to see where following these idiots will take us.  Anyone still want to argue that strong immigration opponents aren't xenophobes?

Hat tip: Reasons Hit and Run

I thought this article by Robert Johnson (via Instapundit) about the Duke Lacrosse case was interesting in that it highlighted how many people on the Duke campus believed that the actual guilt of innocence of the players involved was irrelevant.

First, there was the Duke administration.  I don't think anyone can doubt at this point that the players' guilt or innocence was irrelevant to the actions of the Duke administration, since they meted out their punishments long before the investigation into the facts of the case had even really begun.  Duke was clearly worried most about its reputation and about protecting itself from lawsuits, a not unreasonable fear given this.

It is the actions of the faculty that are truly amazing.  Johnson shows us the thinking of a number of members of the Duke faculty, known as the group of 88, that came out with public statements about the matter.

[Duke Professor Wahneema Lubiano] was pleased "that the Duke administration is getting the point":
the banging of pots and pans had hammered home that a specific claim to
innocence in this case mattered little. "Regardless of the 'truth'
established in whatever period of time about the incident at the house
on N. Buchanan Blvd.," she mused, "the engine of outcry in this moment
has been fueled by the difficult and mundane reality that pre-existed
this incident." To Lubiano, the "members of the team are almost perfect
offenders in the sense that [critical race theorist Kimberle] Crenshaw
writes about," since they are "the exemplars of the upper end of the
class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the
dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group
on campus."

Professor Alex Rosenberg added:

The sole defenders of the lacrosse players in this case, the professor
suggested, are extreme advocates of the economic status quo

Though its not really news nowadays, I guess, the article is a nice reminder that universities tend to have a hard core of faculty that see the world in terms of race, class, and gender rather than individuals and individual action.  Makes you wonder how they go about assigning grades.  In fact, their desire to see the Duke case cast in terms of race and gender apparently caused them to ignore outright political abuses one would normally expect them to decry:

Most stunningly, Rosenberg claimed that every member of the
Group of 88 believed that Nifong was motivated not by the pursuit of
justice but by the looming Democratic primary for D.A. If true, this
breathtaking assertion means that the Duke faculty, despite recognizing
that a local prosecutor was abusing his office to railroad their own
institution's students, chose to go public instead with a mass
statement denouncing the students targeted by that very same prosecutor.

Asymmetrical Information comments on Greg Mankiw by observing:

Harvard scores lowest in student satisfaction *and* enjoys the highest yield (%
of students admitted who attend) of any leading American university. How can the
same institution be so desirable and so disliked at the same time?

The data presented for is for the undergraduate school and my experience is with the graduate school of business, but I think some of my experience can still help answer this question.

At the time I attended, I was sure that the Harvard Business School (HBS) was the best place for me to attend.  I still think that is true.  First, it had (and has) a great reputation with both people hiring for jobs and the general public.  The Harvard diploma has power, power that hasn't lessened even 20 years later.  Second, it had a style that worked well for me personally.  I sat in on classes at other business schools, but HBS classes had an interactive, and often combative, style that I loved and thrived in.  Yes there was work, but the workload never was worse than my undergraduate school.  I would not change my decision.

That being said, while I have showered my undergraduate school with cash, Harvard has not gotten one dime from me.  Because as an institution, it sucked.  It had an incredible arrogance to it, often stating publicly that its customer was NOT the students, but was the businesses who hired its graduates and society at large.  And this was the attitude at the business school, which I was often told was the most student-friendly part of Harvard.  My college roommate Brink Lindsey apparently had a similar experience at Harvard Law, as he was part of a group that founded N.O.P.E., which stood for Not One Penny Ever (to Harvard).

At every turn, one ran into petty, stupid stuff that did nothing to contribute to the educational experience but were frustrating as hell.  The faculty was often arrogant and the administrative and housing staff uncaring. 

At the risk of sounding petty, I will share two examples.  These are small things, but are representative of hundreds of similar experiences over two years. 

• At winter break the first year, we were all given a "gift" of a coffee table book about Harvard.  Then, next spring, we all found a $100 charge on our spring term bill for this "gift"
• My Harvard dorm room had a broken heater in my second year.  It got so cold that ice formed on the inside of the windows.  After weeks of trying, we finally got a maintenance guy to come out.  He set a thermometer down in the center of the room and stared at it for ten minutes.  Then he picked it up and started to leave.  "Why are you leaving?" I asked.  He replied "Because its 53 degrees in here.  State law does not require us to fix the heating until it falls below 50."  I finally had to go to Walmart and buy several space heaters.  Several weeks later I was ticketed by the campus police for having a fire hazard -- too many space heaters.

I do not think it an exaggeration to say that had Harvard scoured every post office in the country for employees, it could not manage to provide worse customer service day-to-day.

And I think this is the answer to the paradox.  If you can tolerate the faculty arrogance, you can get a great education, but Universities are more than just a school.  For most students, Harvard is also their landlord, their only restaurant choice, their local police force, etc. etc.  And for all these other functions, they are terrible.

I am a bit late on this one, but a California judge has determined that giving kids tests that have consequences is unconstitutional:

A judge in Oakland struck down California's
controversial high school exit exam Monday, issuing a tentative ruling
suggesting the test is unfair to some students who are shortchanged by
substandard schools.

If finalized, the unexpected ruling
would block the state from carrying out its plan to deny diplomas for
the first time to tens of thousands of seniors who have been unable to
pass the exit exam.

Note that this standard essentially means that no tests with real consequences (e.g. denial of grade advancement or diploma) can ever be given, because with 1129 high schools in California, some schools will always be below par.  So his argument will always apply -- there will always be kids who can claim their school is on the low end of the normal distribution.  And even if every school were exactly the same, kids within these schools could, I presume, similarly argue to this judge that they had sub-par teachers or sub-par parents or a sub-par reading light or a sub-par dog that ate their homework.

By the way, doesn't this also imply that California can no longer name state champions among high schools in various sports?  After all, isn't that unfair to schools with lesser sports programs?  And couldn't I extend this ruling to say that California state run colleges shouldn't be using high school grades or SAT scores or any other test-based metric in selecting entrants since some of these folks came from low-performing schools?

This confusion of equal protection with equal outcomes is so absurd its not really even worth commenting on further.  I won't even bother, then, asking how the judge expects sub-par schools to be made to improve without testing-with-teeth, or even what objective standards the judge used to determine that any schools were "substandard" in the first place.

For those who support this ruling, and agree with the plaintiff attorney's language that sounds like students have a right to a diploma that can't be denied without due process, here is a question:  What is a diploma?  Obviously, you don't want it to mean that a student has demonstrated basic knowledge and abilities against an agreed upon standard.  Are we reduced to a diploma being a certificate of attendance, indicating that a student grimly sat through 4 years of classes and nothing else?

This same week, the Florida Senate was unable to rescue the very successful state voucher program in the face of last year's insane Florida Supreme Court ruling that vouchers were unconstitutional because the Florida Constitution's uniformity clause:

the Florida Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that the voucher program violated
the "uniformity clause" of the state constitution guaranteeing a
high-quality system of public schools. Because the performance of the
voucher kids was superior to those in public schools, the court ruled that education was not uniform -- or in this case not uniformly miserable.

The program in question that was struck down by the court awarded vouchers to students of schools that failed to pass state standards. 

The program at issue is Governor Jeb Bush's
seven-year-old "Florida A+ School Accountability and Choice Program."
For the first time, schools have been graded on the reading, writing
and math progress made by the children they are supposed to be
teaching. (Imagine that.) Any school that received an F in two of four
years is deemed a failure, and the kids then get a voucher to attend
another school, public or private.

One immediate impact -- according to researchers at
Harvard, Florida State, and the James Madison Institute -- has been
that the mere threat of competition caused many inner-city school
districts to improve. The percentage of African Americans who are now
performing at or above grade level surged to 66% last year, from 23% in
1999.

What is amazing about the court's decision is that every kid who got a voucher, 90% of whom are minorities, came from a school demonstrated by objective standards to be far below average.  But, according to the court, it is constitutional for these kids to be in schools that are far below average, but becomes unconstitutional when kids are moved to above average schools?  Does this make any sense?  I'ts sort of a reverse Lake Wobegone effect -- the system is constitutional as long as all the schools are below average but once any are above average then its unconstitutional.  LOL.

Here is the reason that the court's logic doesn't make sense:  The real thing they are concerned about with the uniformity clause is not uniform quality, but whether the schools are uniformly controlled by the government and uniformly populated with union rather than non-union teachers.

Note that both these decisions use the existence of flaws within the two states' educational systems (e.g. low-performing schools) combined with a "uniformity" or "equal protection" standard to strike down reforms aimed at fixing these very flaws.  Both are saying that you can't reform the schools until all the schools are equally good,  but of course the schools will never improve without reform. 

Update:  But good news in Newark.  It's depressing but not surprising to see my alma mater's own Cornell West out there fighting against school choice for African-Americans.

Update #2:  Walter Olson comments:

It would appear that from now on a high school diploma is meant to
signify not a student's actual mastery of a certain body of material,
but rather the mastery he or she would have attained had the breaks of
life been fairer. Employers, and all others who rely on California high
school diplomas in evaluating talent, would be well advised to adjust
their expectations accordingly.

It appears that at least one group of students in California get a school choice program:  Those with irritating but legally savvy parents willing to exploit special education programs  (Hat tip to Overlawyered)

In Sonoma County, for example, a family recently enrolled its child in an
out-of-state boarding school, then billed its district not only for tuition,
but airfare, car rental, hotel, cell phone calls, meals, tailoring, new
clothes, an iBook computer, stamps, tolls, gas and 13 future round-trip visits.
Total tab: $67,949.

How?  By having their child declared a special ed student and then shamelessly exploiting the legal process to force such settlements

Since 1993, the number of students in public special ed programs rose 27
percent, to 681,969 from 539,073. But special ed students placed in private
schools at public expense rose nearly five times faster  --  128 percent, to
15,926 from 6,994....

Gross described the law's
myriad requirements as "150 points of potential mistakes" for school districts.

Missing even one step can cause a district to lose its case if a
hearing officer finds that a student's education suffered as a result. 

"There isn't an attorney who can't find us making a mistake on one of
those things," Gross said.

So who is qualifying as "learning disabled"?   I bet you aren't thinking of this boy, who got special education funding from the state to go to a private boarding school:

"He was not offered the classes that I thought he needed," the mother
said. "If my son didn't get what he needed, my fear was that he would drop out
of school.'' 

She acknowledged he had never been a discipline problem. The hearing
records describe him as a "young adult who is likable, friendly, energetic and
highly motivated. He is physically active, plays lacrosse and soccer, and
enjoys wakeboarding and snowboarding."

"He's a model child," she said. "However, his frustration and anxiety were
so high that I could see that this is the type of person who, out of
frustration, turns to drugs or something that he shouldn't be doing."

And, uh, what learning disability does this describe, except perhaps the general category of "teenage boy?"  This is a clear case of the most irritating parents with the most aggressive lawyers getting over on the rest of us.  Read it all.  My guess is that most everyone will be irritated, perhaps most of all those with a child with a true learning disability that really needs special help.  And make sure not to miss the state funded "dolphin therapy".  (Update:  Last year we spent a fortune for our kids to swim with the dolphins in Hawaii.  Do you think I can charge that back to my local school district?)

Jennifer Britz, the Dean of Admissions at Kenyon College reports that she is sad to say that she is admitting boys who are less qualified than female applicants in order to maintain gender parity.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any,
hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer,
they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and
universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and
more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women.
Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate
degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

I have four reactions.

One.  Yeah!  Lets take a moment to celebrate a victory for women.  Its great to see us talking about "too many" qualified women flooding colleges, just a few years after feminists were still writing books about schools failing girls.

Two.  I finally get to say something that I have wished for decades to hear from members of various minority groups that have been the benficiary of affirmative action:  Stop giving us men a special break.  Boys in high school are falling behind girls in their achievement, and are not going to get the message as long as you keep taking less qualified boys instead of more qualified girls.  The colleges I attended 20+ years ago survived fine with 2/3 men, they can do the same with 2/3 women.

Three.  This just reinforces my advice I have been giving to Ivy League and other great schools: Find a way to grow!  The new challenge for the 21st century is not to spend an incremental 5% more on the same top students, but to recognize that there are so many more great, polished graduates that are Ivy ready than ever before.

Four.  In this article you can get a little peek at how the college admissions process has turned volunteerism from, well, volunteerism to a grim requirement.  Among eleven-year-olds in my son's class, I saw kids get turned down for an honor society despite having 4.0+ grade point averages, playing multiple sports at a very high level, and doing about 20 hours of community service over the year.  Apparently, this level of community service was not robust enough -- people with lower grades make it, people with no sports make it, people with no leadership activities make it, but NO ONE makes it without a lot more than 20 hours of community service - at the age of eleven.  Believe it or not, my son now keeps a log book of time spent on activities he can count as service -- we have better documentation of this work than we do of his grades!  Volunteerism has become nearly the one minimum requirement that of all the various components is never waived in college admissions.

Everyone seems worked up about Yale admitting an official of the Taliban as a student.  While I find the guy in question pretty bankrupt, I'm not sure I am very excited about starting down the path of vetting potential college applicants against some political extremism standard.  I am sure there are any number of Ivy League freshmen whose beliefs I would find horrifying, but I don't feel the need to start culling them out.  I do find it odd that Yale would have recruited this guy like he was some kind of rock star, and celebrated his choice of Yale as if he was some prize. 

As I have written to my Alma mater Princeton on any number of occasions, I think that Ivy League schools are making a huge mistake which is tangentially related to Yale's Taliban student.  If the University of Texas had accepted him as one of 10,000 or so in their freshman class, there would not be so much outcry.  But this is an Ivy League school, with 20,000 or more kids competing for 1500 freshman spots.  Every parent tends to think, "so my kid with straight A's and a 1350 SAT and 200 hours of community service got turned down at Yale so a misogynist fascist with a 4th grade education can attend?"

Instead of arguing about admitting one less Taliban guy, I urge Ivy League schools to find a way to bring their higher quality of education to many more people.  Princeton, Harvard, and Yale each have endowments over $10 billion each, and they use this money every year to increase the education intensity to the same 1500 people per class.  Every time I go back to visit campus, I see more buildings, equipment, facilities, professors for the same 1500 folks.  Enough!  At some point there has got to be a diminishing return.  It is time for someone in the Ivy League to take the leadership to redefine their mission away from the current facilities arms race with the other Ivy's and towards a mission to broaden their reach in the country.  Instead of yet more molecular biology equipment for the same 1500 people per class, lets find a way to bring a Princeton education to, say, 6000 people a class.  Lets quadruple the size of the Ivy League.

Of course, the Ivy League conservatives (which means, in this context, everyone who graduated before this year and all of the faculty) fear this change.  The last thing the faculty, who we know to be in charge of the asylum from the whole Sommers affair, want is to have more students to teach -- they want the toys.  And alumni fear that somehow the "essential essence" of the university might be lost, though everyone made that same argument when these schools went coed and few today would argue to reverse this decision.   Administrators argue that the freshman pool would be diluted, sort of like the argument about pitching in baseball after expansion.  But one only has to look at admissions numbers to see that quadrupling the freshman class size would cause the Ivy's to lower their standards to... about where they were when I got in!  (If your SAT scores are in the 98th percentile you still have only a 10% chance of getting into Princeton or Harvard.)  The fact is that the pool of high school students in the upper echelons and Ivy-ready has grown tremendously in the past few years, causing Ivy's to narrow their admissions qualifications to near ridiculous levels, with average SAT scores in the stratosphere, hundreds of hours of community service, multiple sports letters, and consultant-aided choices of special activities to differentiate students from the crowd (e.g. bagpipes or falconry).

I understand that this is difficult -- just the issue of physical space is daunting.  But these are the leading Universities in the world.  Surely there is enough brainpower to figure it out if the mission is accepted.  The University of California has of late been doing a lot of interesting things to bring college education to the masses, and dealing with the fact that the number of people who can afford the cost and time of a college degree has increased exponentially.  I think the Ivy League needs to work through the same exercise at the top end of the bell curve.  They need to address a similar near exponential expansion in the number of students who are "Ivy-ready."

Below in my first post on the old 1968 edition of The Population Bomb, I said one of the key mistakes of these doomsayers was static analysis, which I described as:

blind projection of trendlines without any allowance for individuals
actually doing something to alter those trends, particularly in
response to pricing signals.  This leads not only to predictions of
disaster, but to the consistent conclusion that only governments
coercing individuals on a massive scale can avert dire consequences for
humanity

A great example of the static analysis fallacy in action today in in the debate on school choice.  School choice opponents often bring out some or all of these arguments:

• Private schools are often more expensive than public schools, so even with vouchers set at the state per pupil spending, many won't be able to afford private schools
• Private schools have admissions requirements and testing, such that many students will not be able to meet the cut
• Private schools are disproportionately religious, leaving few options for secular parents
• There are no where near enough private schools for the potential demand

Do you see the consistent fallacy?  All the arguments assume that private schools, in terms of pricing, mission, supply, etc., will remain static and unchanged after a voucher program is instituted.  I hate to waste electrons stating the obvious, but the private schools that exist today did not evolve in a vacuum.  They evolved in a world of monopoly public schools, and their nature is based on that reality.  Change that backdrop, and the schools will change.

For example, take the cost issue.  Sure, many private schools are expensive.  The main reason is that private schools have been created in an environment where their customers must have the ability to pay for their kid's education twice.  My kids go to private school, and every month I pay their bill to go to a public school they don't attend (via my property taxes) and then I pay a second bill to the private school they do attend.  As a result, many private schools have high prices, because their customer base can pay.  If the government instituted a special tax so that everyone received a government-funded Yugo, don't you think that the number of inexpensive cars sold by private companies might dry up some?

But private schooling does not have to be expensive.  My kids go to a fantastic school here in Phoenix.  We have moved around a lot, and we have been lucky enough to be able to send our kids to some very good and sometimes very expensive private schools, and I can say with confidence that their school here is both the best and the cheapest!  In fact, the tuition I pay for an education far, far superior to the local public schools is less than what the state of Arizona spends as an average per pupil in the public schools.

The same type of rebuttal can be made to all the other arguments.  Private schools often have tough admissions requirements because the public schools have already staked out the niche for the lowest-common-denominator education, so private schools differentiate themselves by serving an intellectual elite.  But does anyone doubt that if millions of average kids suddenly had $6000 vouchers in their hands, someone would step up to serve the heart, rather than the tail, of the normal distribution?  And I addressed here the huge potential for private school to evolve to serve a diverse range of viewpoints.

Arizona Watch has a nice post on this same topic, including similar thoughts in response to criticisms of school choice:

The statist arguments against HB 2004 are more clearly spelled out in Mike
McClellan's blog
on AZCentral in which he calls HB 2004 "tuition tax fraud." Mike is (surprise
surprise) a public school teacher. Indicative of the quality of public school
education in Arizona, Mike's arguments against HB 2004 are weak, but I'll
briefly refute them here.

1. Private schools can choose who they take "“ many have entrance exams that
will block some students from entering the school.

Mike's correct: private schools can choose the students they accept. Some
students may not qualify for their first choice school. The real point he's
making here is that some students may not have access to private schools even
with the corporate funding "“ that the bill would create a class divide in
education. That's absolutely incorrect. If private schools become affordable to
a significant portion of the population, then more private schools will emerge.
These schools will assuredly serve different market segments. There will be prep
schools, technical schools, art schools, religious schools, atheist schools, and
schools that just provide a decent basic education. There will even be schools
that specifically serve challenged students "“ those students who Mike claims
won't have access to private schooling. The opposite is true. Schools will be
better able to serve a variety of students in a manner far more effecting than
the current one-size-fits-all public school system.

2. Even if they can attend the school, the tuition might not cover all the
costs the student will incur "“ books, uniforms, other fees. If the schools won't
waive those costs "“ and many can't afford to do that "“ the student's family
might not be able to make up the difference.

Certainly some private schools will be more expensive than the tuition grants
can cover. However, many more will design their tuition structure specifically
to stay within the limits covered by the tuition grants. It is absurd to think
that schools would deliberately price themselves out of the market. If the
demand exists, private schools are going to find a way to meet that demand and
earn those tuition dollars.

3. And here's the big one: Republicans apparently believe there are quality
private schools everywhere. They oughta take a more careful look. While Phoenix
and Tucson have plenty of private schools "“ some far too expensive for the
Republican plan, by the way "“ that is not the case in the rest of the
state.

Do you see a trend here? The answer to this last argument is the same as the
answers to the previous two. Tuition grants will create demand for private
schools. New private schools will emerge to meet that demand and collect that
grant money. This is basic economics.

The one concern I have is that statists and choice opponents have many ways to block private schools.  Even with vouchers, zoning and land use laws in many areas have provided a powerful tool to block private school expansion.

By the way, here is one way to test whether people who make these arguments against choice really mean them or are using them to hide the true reasons that they object to school choice:  If they are right, then what are they worrying about?  No new schools will open, no publicly educated kids will be able to afford or meet the admissions standards of those schools that do exist, so nothing will change.  But they seem really worried about school choice, which makes me think that they don't even believe their own arguments.

I generally stay far away from the back-bench spitball fights that seem to go with Supreme Court confirmations (except for Harriet Meier's, but she was so spectacularly bad a choice I felt the need to chime in).  So I am late to the party in noting that apparently Alito came under some fire for being a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton.  Apparently, he has been tagged as a racist, sexist, blah, blah, blah for being a member of this organization.

First, it is worth observing the the Republicans asked for this guilt-by-organizational association stuff.  Long before the Federalist Society membership attack by Democrats was the attack on Dukakis as "a card carrying member of the ACLU".  This is just as dumb as can be.  I, for example, support the ACLU in a number of their endeavors at the same time I have grave problems with certain aspects of their work, particularly their refusal to acknowledge property rights as on equal footing with speech and privacy (which I guess is not surprising since they were founded by a Stalanist).  I am sure it is possible that Alito supports some of the goals of CAP without wanting to make Princeton all-male again.

My second reaction is just to laugh.  While at Princeton, it was always fun to take a shot at CAP for being racist or sexist, since their most public positions always seemed to be about opposing women on campus or affirmative action or similar stuff.  Then and since, though, I have gotten to know a bunch of folks in CAP and have found its really just a bunch of very conservative (little c) folks concerned that Princeton isn't the same as when they were there.  I sometimes agree with them, for example when they oppose political-correctness driven speech limitations, and sometimes disagree with them, particularly when they oppose any sort of dynamism in the school.  In general, I classify them as humans were classified in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:  Mostly harmless.

My problem with CAP is that Princeton, like most of the Ivy League, needs to be more dynamic, not less.  Princeton has done a good job adjusting themselves to many challenges over the last 30 years:  Princeton has gone from no women to being majority women.  It has good representation from most ethnic groups, and it has all the money it could possibly need to make sure any student it wants in the University can afford to go.  Its got every building and piece of equipment a student could ever need, plus a few more.

But here is the real problem, as I see it:  Over the last 30 years, the undergraduate population at Princeton, as with all of the Ivy League, has hardly grown.  The University has become hugely wealthy over this time, has built tons of facilities, but it has all gone to increasing the educational and capital intensity for the same 5000 students.  The challenge as I see it is how do you make this same education available to say 15,000 people at a time instead of 5,000 without changing the heart of the institution. 

Because they aren't creating any new Ivy League schools, while an ever larger portion of the population has the wealth and basic education background and the drive and expectations to want an Ivy-League-quality college experience.  The result is that the admissions process has gotten to be crazy.  Ask any Ivy Leaguer who went to college 20 years or more ago, and ask them "Could you get admitted today" and they will probably answer "no" or at least "I'm not sure".  Education consultants - I have met these folks - are making fortunes coaching kids from the age of 9 or so on how to get a resume built that is Ivy-League-admittable, complete with an oddball hobby selection aimed at catching the admissions board's eye.  Everyone plays piano, so kids started trying the harp and banjo to be different, but even that is overdone so now its probably the bagpipes or something.  Football is out, and lacrosse is probably overdone now, so how about falconry?  Out west, private universities like USC are thriving by being able to offer top educations to much larger numbers of people.  The Ivy League needs to figure out how to do this as well.

Of course, every time I raise this idea at any Princeton forum, I get only negative reactions, being accused of trying to change the very fiber of the university.  You don't have to be born in 1930 to be conservative about the the university and change.  But I keep at it, noticing that the responses I get are identical to those heard when the University went coed.

update:  Well, Joe, I'm not really a big Joe Biden fan.

I was gearing up to write a response to the Florida Supreme Court decision that strikes down a school choice plan as unconstitutional, but Baseball Crank did such a nice job, I will refer you to him.  The plan as crafted allowed students in low-performance schools to opt out with  a voucher for another public or private school.  The justices struck down the law because they felt that the Florida Constitution which requires a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system" of education thereby necessitates schools run by the government only.  Their "logic" was that using a public voucher at a private school thwarted the "uniform" part.

But here is the scary part of their interpretation of "uniform".  Most reasonable people would read the Constitution as meaning "uniform in quality".  But the voucher law as written almost by definition increases the uniformity of quality.  The vouchers were offered only to students at low performing schools.  The recipients of the vouchers could then stay at the same school or use the voucher to go to another school.  Since a voucher holder will only go to a different school if they perceive that school to be better than the school they are leaving, the law increases the net quality of education received (at least in the eyes of parents, though perhaps not in the eyes of the NEA or the education intelligentsia).  By any reasonable definition, improving the education of the kids receiving the worst education as determined by consistent standards should actually improve uniformity of quality, not reduce it.  From a quality standpoint, I would argue it is unconstitutional in Florida NOT to have this school choice plan.

So if it is not uniformity of quality that is being discussed, it must be uniformity of something else.  As Baseball Crank points out, what is left is a strongly Maoist overtone of uniformity of thought -- that everyone is receiving the same state programming.  This ability to opt out of state programming has always been at least as powerful of a driver for private and home schooling as bad quality.  While public education has been controlled mostly by the left, the right has been the main group "opting-out".  However, as the right takes over the left's cherished institutions, I made a plea a while back to the left to reconsider school choice:

At the end of the day, one-size-fits-all public schools are never
going to be able to satisfy everyone on this type thing, as it is
impossible to educate kids in a values-neutral way.  Statist parents
object to too much positive material on the founding fathers and the
Constitution.  Secular parents object to mentions of God and
overly-positive descriptions of religion in history.  Religious parents
object to secularized science and sex education.  Free market parents
object to enforced environmental activism and statist economics.   Some
parents want no grades and an emphasis on feeling good and self-esteem,
while others want tough grading and tough feedback when kids aren't
learning what they are supposed to.

I have always thought that these "softer" issues, rather than just
test scores and class sizes, were the real "killer-app" that might one
day drive acceptance of school choice in this country.  Certainly
increases in home-schooling rates have been driven as much by these
softer values-related issues (mainly to date from the Right) than by
just the three R's.

So here is my invitation to the Left: come over to the dark side.
Reconsider your historic opposition to school choice.  I'm not talking
about rolling back government spending or government commitment to
funding education for all.  I am talking about allowing parents to use
that money that government spends on their behalf at the school of
their choice.  Parents want their kids to learn creationism - fine,
they can find a school for that.  Parents want a strict, secular focus
on basic skills - fine, another school for that.  Parents want their
kids to spend time learning the three R's while also learning to love
nature and protect the environment - fine, do it...

Racially segregated classes at ASU may or may not still exist, and the University may or may not have ended them.  How's that for a follow-up.  FIRE does some more research here, and find:

In fact, there's no reason to believe that the racial restriction on that class
hasn't existed for at least eight years. And unless ASU is a university at which
students sign up for a class directly with the professor (which would be truly
unusual), ASU's administration had to be part of the effort to enforce the
racial restriction.

So why didn't ASU tell the truth in its letter to FIRE, especially if it
was planning to abandon the racial restriction anyway (once it got caught, of
course)? Probably because its administration didn't believe that anyone would
really do the research and find out that legal segregation has flourished on its
campus for at least the last eight years. This brazenness is shocking,
especially considering that a 2002
letter from FIRE got ASU to drop
racial restrictions on a Navajo history class. Are there other classes with
similar restrictions just waiting to be discovered?

I am a big supporter of the work FIRE does to support openness and individual rights in universities.  Today, FIRE turns its attention on Phoenix's own Arizona State University:

State-sponsored racial segregation has found a home at Arizona State University
(ASU).  ASU's ironically named 'Rainbow Sections' of English 101 and 102 have
been advertised on flyers and on the university's website as being open to
'Native Americans only.'

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has written to the
university to demand that the classes be opened to all students. Shockingly,
this marks the second time in less than four years that FIRE has been forced to
protest a racially segregated course at ASU.

It is appalling that ASU would resurrect segregated classes five decades
after Brown v. Board of Education," stated David French, president of
FIRE.  "The idea that a class can be 'separate but equal' was discredited long
ago.

The 'Rainbow Sections' of English 101 and 102, ASU's freshman composition
courses, were advertised as "restricted to Native Americans only" on the faculty
webpage of Professor G. Lynn Nelson, the course instructor.  A flyer
addressed to 'Native American Students' states that they 'are invited to enroll
in special Native American sections of ENG 101 and 102.'  It also discusses some
of the differences between the special sections and the 'standard First Year
Composition classes,' making it clear that the special sections offer a
different educational experience.

Anyone heard of Brown vs. Board of Education here?  I wouldn't have a particular problem with private groups offering such education with these restrictions, after all I have said many times that the right of free association implies a right not to associate with whoever you want.  But public institutions have different obligations in this regard.  Its actually not that hard to deal with, and even ASU knows what the solution is:

FIRE last wrote
to ASU in April 2002 to protest a segregated Navajo history class that
limited enrollment to Native American students. At that time, ASU simply dropped
the racial restriction in response to FIRE's letter.

Its OK to have different versions of the same coursework, and probably OK to advertise one version as specially targeted at a particular group, as long as you let individual students make the final decision on which of the University-sanctioned versions are right for them.

A while back, I made a plea to the left to "come to the dark side" and consider school choice.  In this post, I didn't argue about quality or efficiency improvements, but about diversity:

At the end of the day, one-size-fits-all public schools are never
going to be able to satisfy everyone on this type thing, as it is
impossible to educate kids in a values-neutral way.  Statist parents
object to too much positive material on the founding fathers and the
Constitution.  Secular parents object to mentions of God and
overly-positive descriptions of religion in history.  Religious parents
object to secularized science and sex education.  Free market parents
object to enforced environmental activism and statist economics.   Some
parents want no grades and an emphasis on feeling good and self-esteem,
while others want tough grading and tough feedback when kids aren't
learning what they are supposed to.

I have always thought that these "softer" issues, rather than just
test scores and class sizes, were the real "killer-app" that might one
day drive acceptance of school choice in this country.  Certainly
increases in home-schooling rates have been driven as much by these
softer values-related issues (mainly to date from the Right) than by
just the three R's.

So here is my invitation to the Left: come over to the dark side.
Reconsider your historic opposition to school choice.  I'm not talking
about rolling back government spending or government commitment to
funding education for all.  I am talking about allowing parents to use
that money that government spends on their behalf at the school of
their choice.  Parents want their kids to learn creationism - fine,
they can find a school for that.  Parents want a strict, secular focus
on basic skills - fine, another school for that.  Parents want their
kids to spend time learning the three R's while also learning to love
nature and protect the environment - fine, do it...

Today, Jeff Jacoby, via Cafe Hayek, is making much the same argument:

From issues of sexuality and religion to the broad themes of US history and
politics, public opinion is fractured. Secular parents square off against
believers, supporters of homosexual marriage against traditionalists, those
stressing ''safe sex" against those who emphasize abstinence. Each wants its
views reflected in the classroom. No longer is there a common understanding of
the mission of public education. To the extent that one camp's vision prevails,
parents in the opposing camp are embittered. And there is no prospect that this
will change -- not as long as the government remains in charge of educating
American children....

Imagine how diverse and lively American education would be if it were
liberated from government control. There would be schools of every description
-- just as there are restaurants, websites, and clothing styles of every
description. Parents who wanted their children to be taught Darwinian evolution
unsullied by leaps of faith about an Intelligent Designer would be able to
choose schools in which religious notions would play no role. Those who wanted
their children to see God's hand in the miraculous tapestry of life all around
them would send them to schools in which faith played a prominent role.

Sounds good?  Well, unfortunately, as Cafe Hayek points out, Stacy Schiff in the NY Times recently went off on an anti-choice screed.  Not just anti-school-choice, but anti-all-choice, and readers were writing in in droves to agree!  Jeez, do people really want less choice? And just because you are too lazy to handle responsible decision-making, do you really want to limit my choice as well?  And by the way, who is going to be the official cull-er of choice, and what guarantees do you have that those officials will make the same decisions as you in culling choice?  Virginia Postrel has more thoughts on choice.

The bottom line of choice is that many of those in power do not trust you to make your own choices.  I wrote on distrust of individual decision-making here.  In my article on school choice, I ended with this caution:

Of course, there is one caveat that trips up both the Left and the
Right:  To accept school choice, you have to be willing to accept that
some parents will choose to educate their kids in a way you do not
agree with, with science you do not necessarily accept, and with values
that you do not hold.  If your response is, fine, as long as my kids
can get the kind of education I want them to, then consider school
choice.  However, if your response is that this is not just about your
kids, this is about other people choosing to teach their
kids in ways you don't agree with, then you are in truth seeking a
collectivist (or fascist I guess, depending on your side of the aisle)
indoctrination system.  Often I find that phrases like "shared public
school experience" in the choice debate really are code words for
retaining such indoctrination.

Update: I feel compelled to include this quote from Radley Balko:

Critics of capitalism once predicted that free markets would wreak mass
starvation, depletion of resources, pollution, and death.

They're now reduced to bitching about too many flavors of mustard.

We've won the debate.

The Boston Globe has an article on John Kerry's recently released Yale grades.  Humorously, after all the sturm and drang of him supposedly being an intellectual titan to George Bush's dim-wittedness, his GPA was actually a notch lower than George's at Yale.  Personally, I could care less - grades are important for getting into grad school or that first job out of college.  I can't even imagine GPA coming up much in assessing one's suitability for a job in his forties or fifties.

Anyway, the point I take from this is more about grade inflation that suitability for the presidency.  Both Kerry and Bush got a selection of D's, C's, and B's, and no A's.  And while these may have not been standout grades, they certainly didn't seem to be out of the norm for the time.  My question:  Does any student today who can fog a mirror in the Ivy League today get grades this low?  My guess is no.

Postscript: By the way, Kerry released his military records (which were the source of the Yale grades) and there does not appear to be any ticking time bombs in it.  In fact, there are several pieces of information that would have helped him in the campaign, including commendations from several of his swift boat vet critics.  Why in the hell did he drag his feet on this and give the Republicans a free campaign issue?

This is the time of year that we get both good and bad reports about graduation speakers.  I think we had Maurice Sendak at my graduation, which was OK.  I also remember that the student body got to vote for one person to receive an honorary degree (rather than the usual criteria for giving the other honorary degrees, which seemed to involve donating a building).  We voted for our UPS driver, who really was one of the most important people in our lives at the time, being our main link to home and the outside world.

Anyway, Ace of Spades has some crude but funny advice for graduation speakers.

Since I went to two Ivy League Schools (Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA), I get asked by parents a lot about how to get their kids into an Ivy League school.  My answer is the same one that I think many of my friends from college give:  "I'm not sure I could have gotten into Princeton if I did it today, rather than 20 years ago".  While the number of bright, qualified students seems to have gone up tenfold over the last decades, the number of admissions spots at Ivy League schools has hardly changed, and few new schools have emerged as Ivy League equivalents (if not in fact, at least in the perceptions of the public).

I have recently discovered this really nice blog by Kurt Johnson, who recently got accepted to attend Wharton business school next year.  He has several good posts about school rankings and admissions, including this one here.  The curves showing that only about 20% of applicants in the top 1 percentile of test scores get into Princeton is scary.  Yes, I had good SAT scores, somewhere in the 1500's  (I would never have believed at the time I would have forgotten the number, but I seem to have).  At the time, that was pretty much a layup for getting into the Ivy League, though I had some decent sports and activities as well.  Now, the odds are I wouldn't make it.

Today, parents are downright crazed in trying to figure out what it takes to get in.  For example, any of the 11 year olds at our elementary school do community service, which I guess is fine though it seems to be driven more by setting up early resume wins rather than saving the world.  Things like piano and violin are out:  Parents are pushing their kids into more unique, differentiated instruments like bagpipes or the xylophone.  My old college roommate, whose kids go to a college prep school in DC, joked that he planned to send the other school parents into a jealous hysteria by telling them his kids were competing in falconry.

Kurt also makes a good point about one of my pet peeves of performance measurement:  that is, measuring a process based on inputs rather than outputs.  You see this all the time, for example, when the department of homeland security talks.  They say things like we have xx thousand agents making xx checks with xx equipment blah blah.  Yes, but are we safer?

Postscript: By the way, after reading Kurt's work, he is basically going to Wharton for a piece of paper.  He already appears to be at least as thoughtful an analyst of business issues as most poeple I know with Ivy League MBA's.  OK, this is a bit unfair.  I learned a lot that was useful in my first year of busienss school, then I entertained myself in the second year with a lot of material that was interesting but I never used much.  My MBA was sort of a 1-year technical degree with an extra year in "business liberal arts".  I have talked to lawyers that say the same thing about law school.

Posting will be light to non-existent the next few days as I head back to Princeton for reunions (my 21st reunion, not an even year, but we Princeton grads can be goofy that way).

I will leave you with this good news about my alma mater, via FIRE:

PRINCETON, N.J. -- After being initially rebuffed by a Princeton University
official, a group of evangelical Christian students who wanted access to
facilities and the chance to apply for funds has won a victory.

After
the university's dean of religious life refused recognition for Princeton Faith
and Action, the group appealed to a campus rights group that successfully
lobbied the university to change its procedures.

"We found Princeton's quick and fair response very encouraging. We've found
other colleges who haven't been particularly fair to religious groups, sometimes
in an unconstitutional way," said Greg Lukianoff, an official with the
Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Princeton Faith and Action has now been recognized as a student group,
religious groups are being treated that same as secular groups, and the
university will conduct a review of procedures related to student organizations,
said Princeton Provost Christopher L. Eisgruber.

"We need to be
welcoming groups, even if their opinions are unorthodox, and that is the goal of
our review," Eisgruber said.

After sending this to several people, I got the odd response "gee Warren, I didn't think you were an evangelical".  I am not, nor am I a conservative, and the PFA would not be my cup of tea.  However, I think this response is endemic of a major problem we have in this country, that of "free speech for me but not for thee." 

Its great to see Princeton working to stay open to all points of view, which I think will make it a better university and give it an advantage over time vs. the Harvard's and Dartmouth's of the world that still resist freedom of inquiry outside the bounds of political correctness.  Someday soon I will have to write a post on how "freedom of association" absolutely requires the converse:  freedom not to associate with certain people.  Anyway, in the mean time, I will leave you with some reunions photos. 

Teachers at one school district in California chose not to select a teacher of the year this year, because it smacked too much of recognizing and rewarding competence (hat tip: best of the web):

The name of the winner was to have been
announced at tonight's school board meeting. Instead, Leach will read a
statement explaining why the union has decided not to pick a single
winner this year....

That coincided with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first pitch for
merit pay for public-school teachers. His proposal has met with strong
opposition from some teachers around California and from a key state
education official.

"We decided that choosing one among us as the best is similar to merit pay," Leach said.

This reminds me of Bill Gates's Life Lesson #8:

Your school may have done away
with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished
failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right
answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Except, perhaps, teaching.  More on teachers and their union here and here and here.

"You took a teaching position, 'cause you thought it'd be fun, right?
Thought you could have summer vacations off...and then you found out it
was actually work...and that really bummed you out"

-- Carl to Vernon, in

Update May, 2015:  Since Jon Stewart raised the issue of Baltimore school under-funding, we look at the salaries of Baltimore school teachers.  Short answer:  On a full-year basis, Baltimore teachers start at over $61,000 a year, not including generous benefits.

If you go to the NEA web site, you will see that they argue that most of the problems in education boil down to either low teacher pay or overly high teacher productivity expectations (i.e. classroom size).  I fisked many of these claims here and here, but most media outlets still quote these assertions credulously when they write about education.

I have found (from some past emails I have received) that one of the ways to really irritate a teachers union rep is, when they lament their low salaries, to point out that they only work 9 months a year, and they should multiply their salaries by 1.33 to make them comparable to the rest of ours.  For example, per the NEA web site, teachers made a bit over $56,000 on average in California in 2004. Lisa Snell, in this month's Reason, estimates that benefits add nearly $16,000 to this compensation package, for a total of about $72,000 per year for California teachers.  Normalize this for the fact they work 9 months (or less) a year, and you get them making an equivalent of $100,000 a year.  Woe is me.

Of course, California is high vs. other states on salary, and the "9 months" estimate is only approximate, and doesn't count the fact that teachers typically work a shorter work week than many other professionals.  Fortunately, Snell pointed me to this article in Education Next, which has a fantastic rebuttal to the "teachers are underpaid" myth.

A substantial body of evidence implies that teachers are not underpaid
relative to other professionals. Using data on household median
earnings from the U.S. Department of Labor, I compared teachers with
seven other professional occupations: accountants, biological and life
scientists, registered nurses, social workers, lawyers and judges,
artists, and editors and reporters. Weekly pay for teachers in 2001 was
about the same (within 10 percent) as for accountants, biological and
life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, while
teachers earned significantly more than social workers and artists.
Only lawyers and judges earned significantly more than teachers"”as one
would expect, given that the educational training to become a lawyer is
longer and more demanding.

Teachers, moreover, enjoy longer vacations and work far fewer days per
year than most professional workers. Consider data from the National
Compensation Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which computes hourly earnings
per worker. The average hourly wage for all workers in the category
"professional specialty" was $27.49 in 2000. Meanwhile,
elementary-school teachers earned $28.79 per hour; secondary-school
teachers earned $29.14 per hour; and special-education teachers earned
$29.97 per hour. The average earnings for all three categories of
teachers exceeded the average for all professional workers. Indeed, the
average hourly wage for teachers even topped that of the highest-paid
major category of workers, those whose jobs are described as
"executive, administrative, and managerial." Teachers earned more per
hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers,
statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space
scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level
foreign-language teachers, librarians, technical writers, musicians,
artists, and editors and reporters. Note that a majority of these
occupations requires as much or even more educational training as does
K"“12 teaching.

Curious about the data she uses, I went straight to her source, which is here, and now has data through 2003 online that can be queried.  Sure enough, her conclusions are right there in the Labor Department data:

Note that when corrected for hours worked onto a $ per hour basis, teacher salaries are higher than the average white collar or professional worker, and quite competitive with other professionals such as engineers and managers.  In fact, if you were to take out private school teachers (which mix the number lower, see below) the average for public school teachers is even higher.  Occupations making more than teachers such as doctors and lawyers require much more education and long-term commitment than the average elementary school teaching role.

By the way, the Education Next article linked above gives us another clue that is useful in understanding teachers salaries:  For the vast majority of professions, a government job in that profession pays less than an equivalent private job.  People accept the lower government salary for a variety of reasons --  sometimes for unique work (e.g. interning with the DA as a young lawyer), sometimes for the higher benefits and more job security, and sometimes just because the jobs require fewer hours and frankly have lower performance expectations than their private equivalent.  The one glaring exception to this public-private salary relationship is with teachers salaries, where the salaries of public school teachers are often as much as 50% higher than their private school equivalents.

Wow!  Its no wonder that the NEA hates the idea of school choice and competition from private schools.  They have built a public employment gravy train, with premium salaries, no real penalty for under-performance, and double digit raises for a 180 day a year job -- all while selling the media on their woe-is-me-we-are-underpaid myth.

Correction:  Messed up the Breakfast Club quote - it was spoken from Carl the Janitor to Vernon, not by "Carl Vernon".

Update: A lot of people ask "What do you have against teachers?" and I answer, "nothing."  I can't remember complaining about what any employee of a private firm makes.   In fact, for employees of private firms, I am happy to root for you to get all you can.  Go for it.  But teachers are not private employees -- they are government workers, just like every other government bureaucrat who gets paid by my taxes that are taken from me against my will.  If I pay your salary, and in particular if I pay your salary against my will, you can be sure I am going to demand accountability.

By the way, I send my son to a private junior high.  The school is widely acknowledged to do a much better job than any public school in the city.  And you know what - my tuition at this school is $2000 per year LESS than the average per pupil spending in Scottsdale public junior high schools.  And this school is 100% tuition supported (it is a for profit secular institution so it can't take contributions) and it turns a profit for the family that owns it.  You know how many principals, assistant principals, administrators, and clerks it has for a 300 person junior high school?   Two.  The number at a similarly sized public school would be ten times as high. At least.