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05 August 2021

Equity In Education

What steps can be take to address inequity by race, class, and gender in higher education, that would be better than stripping the college curriculum of general education requirements to make college degrees possible to earn in less time at a lower cost (thereby advancing equity, which the person to whom I was responding to was primarily considering in light of its impact on black college students)?

This isn't by any means a complete list, but here are a few thoughts on the subject.

1. College affordability which needs to change if we are to have anything approaching a meritocracy - providing grant based financial aid to the full extent of financial need to every academically qualified college student is the easiest and least expensive single step one could take to improve socioeconomic equity in the U.S. 

College attendance and completion is far more closely related to family income, even after controlling for academic performance, than it should be in the U.S.

2. Law school and med school ought to be an undergraduate programs as it is almost everywhere else in the world, turning a 7 year law school program and 8 year med school program into a 4 year law school and 5 year med school program. 

This is both an issue for affordability, and an issue of making it easier for women who are on a "biological clock" if they want to have children at a reasonable age, to pursue these professions.

3. While there are countries that have three year bachelor's degrees (and both my daughter and I graduated from college in three years in the U.S.), but that is made possible by essentially fitting the first year of the U.S. college curriculum into H.S. 

From a racial equity perspective in the U.S., I think a system that required that kind of H.S. program to go to college would exclude more black Americans from higher education than the status quo because the H.S. quality divide in the U.S. is greater than the higher education divide, so that would be a net minus and an extra year to figure out what you want to be when you grow up is also worthwhile. 

More plainly, lots of black Americans are stuck in shitty high schools - general education in college remedies a lot of the shitty H.S. education those students got, without penalizing kids (black and not black) who got good H.S. educations. 

Higher ed is easier to fix than K-12 for reasons that are hard to change in the short to medium run. K-12 education funding, curriculums and operations are controlled by state and local elected officials in a very direct, hands on way, and while school choice options exist, in lots of places there aren't any choices or aren't any good choices. The wide choices available in higher education, and the limited amount of political interference in how higher education operates, helps address institutions that are seriously deficient at that level better than the political tools at the K-12 level do.

The U.S. has among the best higher educational institutions in the world, and best typical higher educational experiences in the world, in terms of teaching quality, and its K-12 educational standards are not nearly so impressive.

4. Degree inflation and requiring degrees for positions that don't actually need them is a serious problem. Lots of jobs that only need four years of education require a graduate degree, lots of jobs that a two year degree is sufficient for require a bachelor's degree, lots of jobs that high school is sufficient for expect some college. But, the next point gets at an important source of this problem.

5. Four year college programs, that general education requirements contribute to, are appropriate because a lot of what one gets out of college (even more so for black students, on  average, than for middle class white students) is assimilation into an emerging multi-ethnic national social class of college educated people. Lots of inflated degree requirements are imposed because that is what employers are really looking for, and two years isn't enough to do that well.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Andrew,
    Not going to engage most of the posting, but for N=1, one of the family's real good friends is a elementary teacher. She bright, hardworking, dedicated, Democrat and doing fine in her current school system. In Texas there is a school loan forgiveness program for teachers, just need to teach in a under privileged school for a few years. Her four years in an inner city Houston junior high school were... incredibly bad? Insulted, physically threated, assaulted, screamed at, car vandalized, the list goes on. How do you fix that? Is your answer send them all to college? I have sympathy for the situation of those inner city kids but it's not a problem that anyone has a workable solution for. Cheers,
    Guy

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  2. Change is difficult because the employees have captured control. Teachers wield quite a lot of political power, and are uninterested in any changes that would decrease that power, such as improving parents' ability to take their children elsewhere.

    In my state, Illinois, funding is not obviously a cause of inequality. Chicago has great inequality of outcomes from different schools, but very generous funding. 'Downstate' schools struggle for funding but have rather good outcomes.

    Our public education system is broken. I see no hope for its reform as long as the teacher's unions exist. Plows and salt.

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  3. @Guy Ultimately, we need to fix both. But in the short and medium term, remedying gaps in the H.S. curriculum in dysfunctional schools by continuing to provide general education in college is a more feasible solution than fixing the sprawling K-12 system.

    @TomBridgeland. The politicians are more of a source of the problem than the employees.

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  4. Hi Andrew,
    I have been thinking about this for years... it preys on my mind. One of the reasons I was attracted to school busing was getting the inner city kids out of that environment. But getting white parents to allow their kids to go to dangerous inner city schools is impossible. That would lead to a brand new version of white flight.
    So I introduce a new plan (that I'm sure a sociologist has already proposed). The Blighted Neighborhood Housing Program. Families in blighted neighborhoods could apply for a federal program to get out. The federal program would buy houses for sale on the commercial market in majority white areas (i.e. 70% white and hispanic) and relocated families would receive subsidized mortgages such that they only pay a smallish (10% maybe) of the actual mortgage. After 20 years the house would be theirs free and clear.
    I can see a number of objections. 1) claims of cultural genocide. 2) destruction of minority voting districts. 3) Would need a house price cap figured out somehow. 4) What to do with houses that don't get paid for successfully. (Don't convert to rental. Don't recycle them into the program. Sell them and eat the loss.)

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