Education Dept.’s Top Student-Aid Official Steps Down

Sorry, but there is so much sexism in the title of that book that wild horses couldn’t drag me to read it. You could spend 5 essays unpacking everything that is wrong with it.

The days of “Reviving Ophelia” seem quaint now. I teach at a “very selective” liberal arts college, where the young women simply rule. Developmentally, it seems, the guys are a few years behind. This would never fly, but it might be good for young men to spend several years doing something else after high school — I’m not necessarily suggesting the military — before attending college. At that point the playing field would be level. My own experience bears this out: I was a total mess as an undergraduate, but by the time I was in a doctoral program (after a few years’ work experience), I was incredibly motivated and organized.

What is the problem? Fewer males are wasting time and money. Sounds like an improvement.

“You can lead a boy to college, but you can’t make him think.”

- Elbert Hubbard 1856-1915

Boys have never been too interested in studying. That is why for at least two thousand years you needed the equivalent of the pedagogue, a slave to beat the boy who lacked motivation.
As the Bible says: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

With the end of college draft deferments, college lost its purpose for many boys.
Without the draft, without the rod, much of the motivation was gone, leaving only “Wine, women and song”, but those are all readily available elsewhere.

In the early 20th Century, maybe 10% of boys were interested in studying, this in the day of the all-male Harvard, Yale and Princeton, almost exclusively admitting the output of elite Protestant prep schools, the sons of the elite Protestant establishment (see Karabel’s “The Chosen”). So today, why would you expect any more than 20% of college graduates to be male, if there is academic rigor in the program? But you would expect higher male participation in the binge drinking, beer pong, party school. What is the value in that? It should be regarded as suspicious if there are more than 20% males in rigorous non-STEM programs.

Eat, Drink and be Merry! For tomorrow, you will be unemployed, underemployed and still deep in debt!

Various CHE articles and posts point out that unless you are in a Top n program, your prospects are pretty dim. Various CHE articles spawned by “Academically Adrift”, tout the lack of value or trivially small value of college. (Not that I believe “Academically Adrift”. See my critique in my posts at http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/richard-vedder-on-the-ills-of-higher-education/28716
).

I haven’t seen any articles mentioning any gender differences being reported in “Academically Adrift”. It may be that all of what little improvement in CLA scores reported was due to female students. It is hard to imagine too many male students wasting much time taking the CLA test. As Dilbert would say: “it has the sweet smell of unnecessary work”. Alison doesn’t believe in the existence of a special male “work avoidance chromosome”. Her test with Ashok confirms its existence. Plus there is beer to drink, poker to be played, games to be played and videos to watch.

I also don’t see mention of gender differences in “Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa and Esther Cho. I see in Table 2, on page 18, that for their sample the mean Male % is .37!! I must admit that 0.37% does seem like a low percentage of males. But given their seeming problems dealing with numbers, they probably meant 37% (only off by a factor of 100). This compares to their reported mean for all 4-year institutions of .45% (they probably meant 45%).

http://highered.ssrc.org/files/SSRC_Report.pdf

It could be that the CLA test is structured to guarantee that female and male results are exactly the same, using a similar process as used by IQ, SAT, ACT and other tests to select a question mix that guarantees equal scores.

Some of Benton’s CHE articles describe the sad fate awaiting those graduate students who are not independently wealthy.

The possibility that males can’t drink, watch YouTube, tweet, play World of Warcraft, play online poker and study effectively, all at the same time, is NO tragedy, is no problem.

Who are Higher Education’s winners? They certainly will NOT be most of those enrolled now.
How well are teachers, social workers, nurses, freelance writers and Humanities adjuncts treated today? Higher Education has become a “social trap”.

Single-mindedness is still rewarded within Engineering, derivative creation, derivative trading, Silicon Valley start-ups etc. Maybe most of the rewards go to the lucking 1%. But the “Jack of all trades, master of none” multitaskers, regardless of gender, face a even gloomier fate, unless they are graduates from the right Top n schools, with the right sports, the right personality, the right appearance, the right connections and the right luck.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565
says the very best jobs are really only available to graduates from “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford”

“Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth.”

- Elbert Hubbard

It is argued that a relatively few Americans and the rest of the world are actually the main economic beneficiaries of “today’s information economy.” An economy that enables more “Winner-Take-All markets”. See Robert Frank’s writings about such markets.

De-industrialization, out-sourcing, off-shoring, in-shoring, technical innovation and illegal workers have help slash the earnings of non-college men and stagnate the real earnings of most college men. People point at the trade deficit and debt levels (personal and governmental). Some credit Higher Education with an important role in making it happen, in making the rest of the world much more competitive and driving up debt levels. Maybe China and India et al. are Higher Education’s winners.

Then there is the re-occurrence of what happened during the Great Depression of the 30′s. Men lost their jobs by the millions. While women continued to work and in some cases started working or returned to work. Relatively speaking, women did better than men. Some of that change was reflected in the growing importance of women in Hollywood films. In the 1939 “The Wizard of Oz”, it is the girl, Dorothy, who has to lead the men, who are kind of foolish. Betty Friedan had a great time at Smith College. It was the post-war period that was the problem for her and her graduating class in suburban exile.

Everyone deserves their day in the sun. It seems unfair to begrudge them that.

Maybe declining male college participation is due to playing closer attention to “The Wizard of Oz” movie. Maybe they don’t want to be duped like the Scarecrow.

* The Wizard makes clear the fraudulent nature of university and credentials when he explains to the Scarecrow:

“…great universities….And when they come out they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing that you haven’t got: a DIPLOMA! …. I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D. …That’s, uh, er, ah, Doctor of Thinkology”

* The Scarecrow immediately recites a mathematical theorem. Too bad it is a grotesque perversion of the Pythagorean Theorem. Back in 1939, many of the children in the audience (and those “Smarter than a Fifth-Grader”) would have known the real theorem and known that the Scarecrow is no smarter than he ever was. But his self-esteem has certainly improved.

* The Wizard of Fraud consistently seeks to show us the true nature of symbols of authority, the true nature of reputation and the truth about credentials, as we see him try to con, deceive and cheat all through the film.

The real problem ignored by the DOE is the conflict of interest between the for profit industry, elected officials, and the taxpayers. When the for profit industry is in trouble it has every incentive to use the political process to improve its chances of survival. Elected officials who see an opportunity to extract political contributions and other favors often are eager to help. Regulators at the DOE and accrediting bodies like the HLC are also willing participants insuring survival of the industry because their current positions and future ability to market themselves to the private sector are enhanced in this process. Elected officials and regulators know that there is a good chance the problem will get worse, but they don’t care. By the time the industries problems become too visible to be ignored and the student loan debt crisis hits they will be long gone and a new generation of elected officials and regulators in place. And for this new generation the “crisis” will present additional opportunities to search for scape goats and rescue the industry. These efforts are then used to convince tax payers who are left to pay the bill, that the government is on their side and something is being done to bring the guilty like Kaplan University to justice.

Who are all these “executive-branch leaders from traditional higher-ed backgrounds in the current administration”?

In reality they are mostly from large banks and financial services companies. And the Undersecretary’s background is in the leadership of community colleges, hardly the “traditional higher-ed background” typically seen in these types of appointees (doctoral-level, research universities).

For decades, Congress and executive branch Administrations have met repeatedly with lobbyists of all stripes, including proprietary schools and their associations. Meeting with short sellers is no different. Politicians, particularly Democrats, seem eager to get input from those with different viewpoints, particularly those with unique private-sector expertise. If short sellers bring to the table some new types of analysis which have not been seen from the “usual suspects” of postsecondary education lobbying, then opposition to this circumstance has less to do with the results than with the fact that the old boys network doesn’t want additional seats at the table, when the table has been unusually stagnant and incestuous over the past couple decades. This also explained the “good old boys’” resistance to loan sales and auctions which could have saved the guaranteed loan program.