Best Stipends for Graduate Assistants? Head for the Biology Department

I think that you are misinterpreting that chart.  Since the numbers above the red bars add up to 100% and are not strictly decreasing, they would appear to be based on the highest level of education attained.  What the chart says, then, is that 40% of the male residents in the county _stopped_ at a high school diploma.  If we add in the figures for higher levels of education, we get a much less shocking (if not particularly comfortable) figure: 89% of the male residents of the county have attained a high school level of education or better.

Claire,

Thanks so much for this even-handed essay! I have been overwhelmed by the partisan myopia of many Chronicle columns lately and it’s great to see you showing common sense irrespective of party. I’m a conservative but I’m a Claire Potter fan for today. :)

By the way OF COURSE his grades are not relevant at this point, especially since he hasn’t officially announced his run and Obama never released his transcripts. Going to Harvard or teaching there doesn’t mean you know how to reduce deficits or conclude a war on terror honorably — as we have witnessed with Bush and Obama both graduating from Harvard and surrounding themselves with Ivy League wunderkinder, and both flopping around and making the same puerile mistakes. Book smarts and competency are not so intertwined, though it pains us to think so.

Bush and Obama both graduating from Harvard and surrounding themselves with Ivy League wunderkinder

Bush did not surround himself with Ivy League wunderkinder. He surrounded himself with low-grade hacks educated at religiopartisan indoctrination mills like Liberty University and Regent University School of Law.

It is questionable whether grades matter or not, granted.  But your
excuses for his grades seem bogus to me.  I graduated from Gladewater
H.S., Gladewater Texas, a small town in East Texas.  I went on to one of
A&M’s rival schools (some would say a school more difficult that
A&M) where my grades were good enough to get me into Harvard for
grad school.  Preparation in a small school is what individuals make of
it.  Overall I’d say it’s an issue of character and desire.  How much
does one want to do well, how much is one willing to sacrifice to do
well. 

I agree. I also propose other reasons for less than stellar grades. For example, he may have been spending a lot of time in political activities. Given where he is now, whether you agree with his politics or not, you might say that was a good career move. Certainly I have known and taught very bright students who got mediocre grades because getting As was not their priority. Bs would be fine. And the university experience gave them opportunities to do a lot of other things which, when combined with a university degree from a reasonably prestigious institution, would get them a long way. As are only important if you want to get into grad school. If you don’t, no one cares what grades you got as long as you graduated. And the experience you got doing all the other things (sports, part time job, political activism, etc) may be MORE important to most employers.

I didn’t say that they can’t produce good students, or that it had anything to do with Texas specifically — that was over reading on your part, and obviously touched a nerve, but that isn’t my responsibility. Connecticut  — in a region of the country that is running with prep schools — also has some of the godawfullest high schools in the country, large and small, and I shouldn;t have to say that for you to know that I’m not “provincial.” Part of what my post is about is the turn to name-calling rather than reasoned argument about ideas.

  What I was presenting was a range of other possibilities that actually looked for some context — income inequality, education trajectory more generally in the region — other than “character” and “morality” which explains nothing.  The right invented this stupid language to talk about success and failure in order to mask the effects of abandoning millions of people to poverty and stripping their economies of anything that might support a sustainable life (which *is* happening in Texas, which has always had a boom-bust economy, and has been since the 1920s.)  For liberals to adopt this unquestioningly is a lousy direction for politics.  That’s the point of the piece.