Michael Kimmel on “The Boy Crisis” and Anti-Male Ideology
| November 17th, 2006Via Dylan at Handle The Truth, a fantastic article by one of my favorite writers, Michael Kimmel, regarding the so-called “Boy Crisis” in education.
After outlining the case for the Boy Crisis, Kimmel effectively goes over the reasons for doubting the “crisis” exists: That historically, panics over boys in crisis surface again and again (and women - whether in the form of female schoolteachers or of feminists - are always to blame); that wage gaps would lead us to expect boys to have less incentive to stay in school (someone who can earn $20,000 a year out of high school is a good deal more likely to drop out than someone who can earn $14,000);1 how “No Child Left Behind” has hurt boys who would benefit from gym and sports programs, and from counseling; and that far from being a universal among boys, the “boy crisis” is virtually all among boys from lower-income families and boys of color. Kimmell writes:
Why don’t the critics acknowledge these race and class differences? To many who now propose to “rescue” boys, such differences are incidental because, in their eyes, all boys are the same aggressive, competitive, rambunctious little devils. They operate from a facile, and inaccurate, essentialist dichotomy between males and females. Boys must be allowed to be boys—so that they grow up to be men.
This facile biologism leads the critics to propose some distasteful remedies to allow these testosterone-juiced boys to express themselves. Gurian, for example, celebrates all masculine rites of passage, “like military boot camp, fraternity hazings, graduation day, and bar mitzvah” as “essential parts of every boy’s life.” He also suggests reviving corporal punishment, both at home and at school…
I was one of the boys who failed all the “masculinity” tests; I was gentle, overly sensitive, and could no more catch a ball than I could catch a jumbo jet plane. I can’t imagine how I would have survived the kind of schooling Gurian wants to shove boys into. But because wimpy boys don’t fit into the biological-essentialist worldview, their needs are never considered by the boy-crisis mavens. Their allegedly “pro-boy” reforms are really only about helping the jocky boys; all other boys can go hang.2
A crisis among lower-income and non-white boys is still a crisis, of course.3 But to talk as if an inability to do well in contemporary schools comes with the Y chromosome is deceptive. There already are many schools in the USA, right now, in which boys do just as well as girls. Boy crisis mavens tend to talk about how boy brains can’t learn if they’re expected to sit still in class, to read novels, to do homework, and to follow rules; but in schools where boys excel, boys are expected to do all those things.
Nonetheless, it’s a fact that among some groups, boys are doing worse than girls. Why is this? Kimmel argues that a false and damaging conception of masculinity harms boys by dissuading them from putting as much effort as they should into their schoolwork, even as it encourages them to be overconfident about their abilities.
Kimmel has angry words for the anti-male ideology underlying the “boy crisis” panic:
It is not the school experience that “feminizes” boys, but rather the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed. “The work you do here is girls’ work,” one boy commented to a researcher. “It’s not real work.”
“Real work” involves a confrontation — not with feminist women, whose sensible educational reforms have opened countless doors to women while closing off none to men — but with an anachronistic definition of masculinity that stresses many of its vices (anti-intellectualism, entitlement, arrogance, and aggression) but few of its virtues. When the self-appointed rescuers demand that we accept boys’ “hardwiring,” could they possibly have such a monochromatic and relentlessly negative view of male biology? Maybe they do. But simply shrugging our collective shoulders in resignation and saying “boys will be boys” sets the bar much too low. Boys can do better than that. They can be men.
Perhaps the real “male bashers” are those who promise to rescue boys from the clutches of feminists. Are males not also “hardwired” toward compassion, nurturing, and love? If not, would we allow males to be parents? It is never a biological question of whether we are “hardwired” for some behavior; it is, rather, a political question of which “hardwiring” we choose to respect and which we choose to challenge.
The antifeminist pundits have an unyielding view of men as irredeemably awful. We men, they tell us, are savage, lustful, violent, sexually omnivorous, rapacious, predatory animals, who will rape, murder, pillage, and leave towels on the bathroom floor—unless women fulfill their biological duty and constrain us. “Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous ills,” writes David Popenoe. Young males, says Charles Murray, are “essentially barbarians for whom marriage . . . is an indispensable civilizing force.”
By contrast, feminists believe that men are better than that, that boys can be raised to be competent and compassionate, ambitious and attentive, and that men are fully capable of love, care, and nurturance. It’s feminists who are really “pro-boy” and “pro-father”—who want young boys and their fathers to expand the definition of masculinity and to become fully human.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
- Actually, Kimmel barely touches on the point about the wage gap, but it’s a hobby horse of mine so I’m including it on this list. (back)
- And even the “help” offered jock boys is dubious; such “help” could be accurately termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” (back)
- Let’s not forget, however, that the same crisis exists among lower-income and non-white girls, whose academic achievement is considerably lower than that of their middle-class white counterparts. The real crisis owes much more to class and race inequalities than to sex. (back)
November 17th, 2006 at 8:00 am
The MIT numbers, and those of other science and engineering schools like Cal Tech, may be not readily compared to those of other schools because of the concentration in those schools on graduate study. Here’s MIT’s numbers in detail:
Student Body Profile (2005 - 2006)
Undergraduate 4,066
Graduate 6,140
Total 10,206 students
Undergraduate 43% female 57% male
Graduate 30% female 70% male
Overall, that’s 35% female and 65% male (they had 32 and 68 in the article).
And while we’re at it, I was thinking you all might be interested in this:
Profile of the Admitted Class of 2010
Who they are…
• 1,474 students out of 11,373 (13% admit rate)
• 52% men, 48% women
• 28% are Asian American
• 36% are Caucasian/White
• 22% are members of underrepresented minority groups (African-American, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Native American, and other Hispanic groups)
• 1% Other
• 6% No response
• 7% are international students
Where they live…
• 50 States represented, DC and 2 territories
• 59 Foreign countries represented
Their achievements…
• 48% of those who are ranked are #1 in their high school class
• SAT mean scores - Math 759, Verbal 723
• SAT median scores - Math 780, Verbal 740
• 75% are Presidents/Captains/Leaders/Founders
•17% are academic stars (distinctions such as AIME score of 10+, National Science Fair finalists, International Olympiad medal winners, etc.)
•12% are non-academic stars (identified talent in art, music or athletics)
Asian Americans are minorities, but they are not considered “under-represented minorities”.
The Institute used to admit far fewer women, but they started to emphasize higher verbal scores (while not backing off on the math scores) and the communications and essay portions of the tests and admissions form, as well as the interview (which I have the honor of getting to conduct a few times a year with local kids).
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 17th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Asian Americans are minorities, but they are not considered “under-represented minorities”.
In the 1930s anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment flourished in higher education. The Census distinguished southern and Eastern European immigrants from native, northwestern Europeans. Jews were the first of the European immigrant groups to enter colleges in significant numbers and faced the brunt of discrimination there. Harvard President Lawrence Lowell was openly opposed to Jews at Harvard. The Protestant elite complained Jews were unwashed, uncouth, unrefined, loud and pushy. The Seven Sisters schools had a reputation for flagrant discrimination. Today, Jews make up 2% of the population but an astonishing 30% of Ivy League college students. Asians make up 4% of the population and face what Jews went through in the 30s. There was a recent study that showed Asian Americans need 50 points more on the the SAT for the same spots of whites at Ivy League colleges. They make up about 15% of Ivy League college students. I read this study the other day and made this parallel.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 17th, 2006 at 9:54 am
So do you think Jews are “overrepresented” at Ivy League colleges, RonF?
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 17th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Donna, it was the admission of Jews, their “overrepresentation” in high test scores that lead to the idea of the “well-rounded” student: by emphasizing sports it was possible to bring in students who’s scores weren’t up to par.
Damn those minority groups who test well and throw things off for the WASP boys.
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 17th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
“Underrepresented Minority” is not my term; it’s what MIT officially uses to help distinguish those minorities present in MIT’s student body at a percentage below that of the general population vs. minorities (e.g. Asian-Americans) who are present at percentages above those of the general population. Donna, if that statement about what Asians need to get into Ivy League schools is true it would appear that their admissions policies are markedly different from MIT’s. Which is no surprise to me.
As far as religious presence at MIT goes, here are some numbers from a 2004 survey of incoming freshmen:
42.2% Christian (11 sects + “Other Christian”)
41.2% None
4.8% Jewish
3.5% Hindu
2.5% Buddhist
2.5% Islamic
2.0% Other
0.9% Unitarian
0.5% LDS (Mormon)
10% of the people answering the survey said “Yes” to “Do you consider yourself a Born-Again Christian?” Given the breakdown of the Christian sects, I wonder about that. The survey is at http://web.mit.edu/ir/surveys/ug_2004_CIRP_freshman_survey.pdf
To answer the question specifically about the Jewish presence, the first survey I ran across on a Google search (taken in 2001) says that about 1.3% of the American population describes itself as Jewish, so I wouldn’t describe Jews as being underrepresented at MIT if these figures are representative of the Institute student body as a whole. I can’t answer for the validity or methodology of the study, so if you want to dispute that go right ahead.
When I went to grad school at a medical school, I don’t know what the exact proportion of Jews were there. But they closed for Jewish holidays, so you figure it out. Not too many other Episcopalian kids I know got Yom Kippur off.
Donna, it was the admission of Jews, their “overrepresentation” in high test scores that lead to the idea of the “well-rounded” student: by emphasizing sports it was possible to bring in students who’s scores weren’t up to par.
Kathe, I’d like to see you back that up with actual facts. Also: the influence of sports on college admissions differs greatly among Division I, II, and III schools. Only Division I schools grant tuition waivers (I refuse to use the word scholarship in this context) for athletes, and even then only athletes in a few sports get them - it’s a very low percentage of the total student body. In a school of any size, any preference for varsity athletes is going to have a minimal effect on the makeup of the student body.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 17th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
As far as “anti-male” bias in education in general; I’m no expert in K - 12 education. And I am not an expert in the differences between how girls learn vs. how boys learn, as I have not been involved much with girls in an educational setting. But I do work with boys quite a bit in non-classroom education and have done so for 14 years now. What I find is that boys learn a lot faster if sit-down instruction is limited to about 30 minutes a dose. If you break such sessions up with some kind of hands-on activity (some recreational, some instructional), they learn better. Sitting boys down for 6 forty-five minute sessions in a day with only one meal break and no hands-on opportunities to learn and little physical activity is asking for trouble. I personally think that schools should bring back recess and let the kids run around the school grounds for about 15 minutes in the morning and the afternoon. I think the girls would like it, too, although I imagine they’d use the time differently than the boys would.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 17th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Oh, I forgot to note that about 24% of the incoming freshman didn’t respond to the survey; the percentages are all based on the total responses only.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 18th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
One of the reasons Jews were so successful in the early 20th century in colleges is elite schools at the time still revered the gentleman’s C and disparaged intellectual pursuits. Colleges also changed from a gentleman’s bastion into a training ground for professionals in the industrial economy in fields such as business, engineering, accounting, pharmacy and scientific farming. The study about SAT scores was from the U of Michigan but it is similar to other elite schools because of the high number of Asian American applicants. I reckon MIT and CalTech would have even higher Asian populations given the same requirements as whites. MIT and CalTech may not be good examples of schools to disprove boys are shortchanged by our education system because it’s drilled into our heads early on that males than males at better at math and science.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 18th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
So while Protestant elites pursued the gentleman’s C, Jews raced ahead and became professionals. We may see the same for Asians if elite schools still revere “well-roundedness”.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 20th, 2006 at 8:41 am
I reckon MIT and CalTech would have even higher Asian populations given the same requirements as whites.
And on what facts do you base this reckoning?
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 20th, 2006 at 8:52 am
I had an educational experience this weekend, and I thought I’d ask for some input on how applicable you think it would be in classroom education.
We were teaching boys cooking. Food groups, menu planning, weights and measures, making a shopping list, portion planning, using store ads, etc. The idea is that the boys are required to be able to plan a breakfast, lunch and dinner menu for a campout, go out and buy the food within a budget, cook the food outdoors so that all the food is done at the right time and is served hot (or cold as appropriate), that everyone gets enough but there’s minimal waste, and be able to clean up afterwards so that all the pots and dishes are properly clean and sanitized and there’s no garbage around to attract insects and animals.
We actually ran all through this; the activity ran all day and ended up with the boys planning menus, going to the store, buying the food, cooking it, eating it and cleaning up.
There’s a certain amount of lecture here, and the kids’ attention wanders. So partway though we had “Food Jeopardy”. My wife had made up a board with 30 questions on it, 5 questions for each of 6 groups (”Weights and Measures” “All about Cheese” “Meat”, and I forget the other 3). The questions got progressively harder and you get more points as you go down the column (they don’t know what the question is until they choose it and I pull the cover off). The boys were in two teams, compete to answer the questions, and the winners got more cookies than the losers at the end (but everyone got some cookies).
The game gave the kids some active fun and a chance to yell and wave their hands and arms without running around, and they still learned something. But if this was a co-ed group, would it have worked? Or would the boys have dominated?
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 20th, 2006 at 8:56 am
Oh, and there was this exchange as I ran the game:
“We’ll take ‘All about Cheese’ for 5 points, Mr. F.”
“‘The kind of cheese used in lasagna.’”
“Cottage Cheese!”
“Sorry, it’s Ricotta.”
“My Mom uses Cottage Cheese!”
“Then your Mom uses the wrong kind of cheese.”
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 20th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Asians have to test higher than whites in elite schools including MIT and the Ivy League.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 12:29 am
And? It hasn’t bothered you folks that whites in elite schools have to test higher than blacks.
I don’t think you can have it both ways — either oppose AA or support it, no unprincipled exceptions when AA works in the “wrong” direction.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 1:05 am
AA exists, at least in part, to mitigate the effects of past and ongoing racism. I don’t think that anti-White racism in the USA is a significant problem requiring an AA mitigation.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:31 am
That’s not the point.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 3:05 am
The point of what?
It isn’t unprincipled to support AA that attempts to mitigate the effects of historical and ongoing discrimination but to oppose AA that attempts to ensure the continued dominance of the dominant group.
Must we, in your opinion, support AA for legacy kids if we support AA for blacks? Would we have to support AA for KKK members? Why? AA is a mechanism. Why on earth are we required to support all application of a mechanism, merely because we support that mechanism in support of a particular goal, even if a particular instance of the mechanism is one which supports an opposite goal.
If we view AA for black people as a small injustice to some which helps to correct a larger injustice to others, then why should we support AA when it is a small injustice to some, which helps to maintain the privileged position of others. If we view AA as a negligible injustice, but view supporting the entrenched power of the dominant group as a bad practice, why would we support AA that helps do exactly that?
This comment was written by Charles S.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 3:09 am
Why on earth are we required to support all application of a mechanism…
Because we don’t trust the government with a morally-based filter for the application of the mechanism. If they are going to use this machine, they must use it in a way that can be applied equally to everyone.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 3:56 am
Well, MIT and most of the Ivy League schools aren’t the government, and I think that is actually relevant. The government isn’t a monolith that we have to either trust or not trust. The government is a set of interlocking institutions that we have a great deal of power over. If we want the government (of the US or of MIT) to apply its power through a morally based filter (our morality based filter), then we have a duty to attempt to influence the government to apply our filter. Obviously, it is a bad idea to leave government institutions and individual employees with absolute carte blance to apply their power through their own moral filters (although it is also possibly a bad idea to leave them with no ability to temper rules with personal judgment), but there is no reason not to attempt to get the government to apply our own moral filter.
It is wrong for the state to take away some one’s freedom and lock them in a small room for years at a time, but we still allow the state to use this method on some people. Must we allow the state to lock absolutely anyone in a small room for any reason if we are willing to allow the state to ever use this method? Are we not allowed to dicker and advocate over exactly which people the state will use this method on, for how long, etc?
This comment was written by Charles S.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 4:48 am
Legacy kids get AA if they belong to a correct race (granted, this is somewhat rare).
As for KKK, I’m unaware of ideology being a legitimate reason for “positive discrimination”.
I will definitely remember that line.
That’s one hell of a tortured analogy. I suppose one could say that no, you shouldn’t advocate for people to be locked on a small room for a year because of something the demographic group they belong to did in the past or is supposedly doing today.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:03 am
For instance, you can remember it when you suggest that jus solis is bad policy, or when you try to get people to care more about the threat from Islam. Presumably, you have some policies that you’d like carried out on the basis of that care, or is it just that you want others to join you in your fear? What do you think is the basis for your policy preferences? Do you think that your policy preferences are unrelated to your morality filter?
Should I not campaign for an end to the death penalty, should Robert not campaign for its expansion, out of fear that we are simply trying to get the government of our country to be in accord with our personal morality? If you disagree with my position, either because you disagree with my morality or because you disagree that my position will be effective, you should try to prevent my position from becoming policy, but the “don’t legislate morality” position is either nonsense, or a very bad phrasing of “my morality and my beliefs about what makes a health happy society is that the laws should support a plurality of moral positions on some questions.” That, itself, is a demand that the law match your moral filter.
Oh, for the record, I also believe in the value of shaming, I just disagree with Robert on what should get shamed.
This comment was written by Charles S.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:09 am
Stop rambling about all sorts of unrelated stuff.
Absolutely and definitely not.
I’m just going to wait for the time y’all start whining about someone “legislating morality”.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:12 am
Oh, sorry, I edited my comment after I posted it, to fix the block quoting, and then I added some more material. Bad practice, and confusing.
That is to say, see above about “legislating morality.”
Oh, and I made “stop rambling” make even more sense.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:14 am
Oh. You edited it.
Whatever.
I just smell hypocrisy here.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:16 am
See, I’m not actually “y’all.” I’m actually a single individual and not some sort of expression of the collective left, so my acceptance of legislating morality is not anyone else’s acceptance of legislating morality.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:17 am
Sure, but it’s going to be fun for unprincipled supporters of AA who use that as their battle cry against laws they don’t like.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:22 am
Hypocrisy is always fun to smell on others.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 5:24 am
It isn’t that they are unprincipled, it is that “stop legislating morality” is a horrible but recognized short hand for “my morality and my beliefs about what makes a healthy, happy society is that the laws should support a plurality of moral positions on some questions, stop legislating against my morality.”
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 7:53 am
Most Asian Americans support affirmative action. It’s different in universities. Like Ampersand said, white legacies get the most “affirmative action” at elite colleges. Actual non-legacy affirmative action hurts Asian Americans and helps Latinos and blacks. Not all races are the same. The environment at alot of elite schools alienates Latinos and blacks so they are not as eager to apply. Asians apply regardless.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 8:04 am
How ’bout opposing legacy AA and non-legacy AA?
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 9:44 am
Tuomas, I guess I’m wondering what your stake on AA even is, considering that as a Finn, you are not living in a very racially mixed environment, and the legacy of slavery as practiced in the U.S. is not something you have to live with every day. Are you trying to say that American institutions of higher education should be pure meritocracies? Just asking.
This comment was written by Original Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 10:06 am
I can’t see why that would be a bad thing.
I do have a stake in this, in a manner that hare-brained ideas such as AA can (and will) metastasize if/when similar differences in among immigrants vs. natives are seen. And there’s always gender quotas etc.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 12:21 pm
There would be alot less whites if elite schools were pure meritocracies. Interesting stuff today about affirmative action in the Harvard Crimson. Only well-off kids can afford SAT preparation courses. These tests don’t measure much except class privilege and useless test-taking knowledge.
“The editorial did not mean to suggest that Asian-American applicants are, either individually or on average, somehow lacking in admissions criteria that are difficult to quantify, such as “leadership qualities, extracurricular involvement, [and] achievement outside of the classroom.” Such a suggestion is patently false: one needs only to look around Harvard to see fellow students who exhibit these qualities.
Rather, the editorial attempted to argue that colleges are justified in looking favorably upon applicants from underrepresented minorities who exhibit these qualities. If you believe in using affirmative action in college admissions—for the sake of creating a diverse student body, or in order to account for challenges students may have faced before applying—then these are the sorts of criteria that make many minority applicants qualified for admissions, despite SAT scores well below those of Asian-Americans or whites.
First, the nature of affirmative action exaggerates the differences in measures of academic success for which it is trying to correct. For instance, students of color, who tend to be poorer, average lower SAT scores than wealthier students. Their lower SAT scores perhaps indicate a lack of opportunity to succeed academically, because of their financial circumstances, more than they suggest an academic deficiency.“
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 12:43 pm
there is no reason not to attempt to get the government to apply our own moral filter
Absolutely. And you’ve done your best, and the population has resoundingly rejected that filter. The vast majority of Americans are opposed to “strong” affirmative action in university admissions (and like “weak” AA programs just fine).
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 1:09 pm
RonF, I’m sorry to keep you witing so long for references. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel is an excellant history of the admissions practices of elite US universities and The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by Daniel Golden, is an exellant look at elite school admissions today. I’m sorry if I was unclear, but when referring to the “overrepresentation of Jews” I was talking about admissions to elite schools in the 1920s.
RonF, you’re making perfectly reasonable comments about how you don’t work with girls, but you do with boys, and how important it is to have breaks and time to run around and then you say ” I think the girls would like it, too, although I imagine they’d use the time differently than the boys would. ” Then I have to wonder why you’d say that? If you don’t have some kind of solid evidence that boys and girls are radically different about recess, why would you go out of your way to make an assumption about it?
For more on how Asian-Americans are the new Jews in admissions, that is, underepresented relative to their test scores, see Golden’s book.
Tuomas, I don’t know where you get the idea that “Legacy kids get AA if they belong to a correct race (granted, this is somewhat rare).” I’m not sure that you understand what affirmative action is. It isn’t one single thing that can be given to someone.
To speak of a meritocracy, especially as opposed to that decadent European aristocracy, of course it sounds like a good thing. The problem is that it is no more successful in application that communism was in the USSR. In a society that has active, ongoing problems with racism, large disparities in every stage of human life (guess who’s more likely to get prenatal care, guess who’s more likely to die in infancy, guess who’s more likely to grow up poor, to attend the nation’s worst schools, to be turned down for jobs and housing, etc.) The current US system, particularly in the elite colleges, isn’t meritocratic. It’s aristocratic, based on inherited wealth and influence trumping everything else.
To refer to Affirmative Action as a “hare-brained idea” would seem to indicate that you don’t have the foggiest idea what it is or how it works. What the hell are you talking about differences between “immigrants vs. natives”? Between WASPs, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Latinos, who is it you think are supposed to be the natives? “There’s always gender quotas?” Oh, really, where? When? What are they? Seriously, you should explain what you think AA is, because nothing you’ve posted has reflected an understanding of it.
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 1:57 pm
What the hell are you talking about? What decadent aristocracy in Europe? Where?
Don’t give me any of that “Communism is beautiful, USSR wasn’t communist enough” bullshit. Seriously.
Meaning differences between incoming immigrants of different ethnicity in, say, university admissions.
You can always make them, if you don’t have much diversity in the society.
Why should I write to the benefit to someone who can not read?
This comment was written by Tuomas.Why should explain anything to
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November 21st, 2006 at 1:58 pm
I’m not sure where the last line came from… Scratch that.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Immigrants vs. natives in European countries, and gender quotas do exist in many Scandinavian countries.
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:01 pm
The vast majority of Americans are opposed to “strong” affirmative action in university admissions (and like “weak” AA programs just fine).
The implicit affirmative action for affluent white male legacies should be abolished before regular affirmative action in university admissions. We’d be well on our way to meritocracy even though many are against that kind of affirmative action.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Well, private institutions can do what they like, whether it’s legacies or AA or whatever. It’s public institutions that are the issue, and as far as I know there are not generally legacy programs at public institutions.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Bush is the most infamous legacy. He would not have gotten anywhere without his Yale degree. There are hundreds of thousands of white males like this from schools that favor legacies. They in turn run everything (into the ground).
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Jeb Bush for example would have been a better president (barf) because he’s smarter but he went to University of Texas Austin where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Latin American Studies. (Thank you, wikipedia.)
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 21st, 2006 at 2:52 pm
I suspect that as a son of a President and powerful governmental insider, as well as a man of his own complex talents and characteristics, that GW would have done OK regardless of whether Yale had legacy preferences or not. In assessing his career, it’s difficult to see where Yale had much to do with his successes or failures.
It’s also worth noting that graduate programs do not generally engage in legacy activities, that no Bush went to Harvard before W did, and that he earned admission and graduation from the Harvard MBA program on his own hook.
My impression of the Bush boys is that Jeb is certainly more articulate than W, but W has considerably more native intellect. Articulation is not intelligence.
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November 21st, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Okay, a little history. Because America was formed as a republic in a direct reaction against the British aristocracy, which was viewed as decadent, the notion of meritocracy was that anyone (white, male, educated, and landowning) could rise based on his own merits and not that of inherited privilege.
I’m not suggesting any such thing as “communism was beautiful.” My point was that many ideology sound good in theory but prove to be rather less good in their actual implementation. Communism and meritocracy are both examples of this.
In talking about AA in the US, we are not discussing “differences between incoming immigrants of different ethnicity in, say, university admissions”. We are discussing differences in admissions between groups who’s ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.
More later.
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November 21st, 2006 at 6:50 pm
This makes no sense. Slightly more than the world’s population is female, slightly less is male. There are perhaps some ambiguities, but if everyone were permitted to choose their preferred gender it is unlikely that the percentages of each would change much. Furthermore, to defend a statement such as “there are always gender quotas” by saying “you could make them” is pretty weak.
And you think I can’t read?
Now I cannot speak to immigrant issues in Europe, nor can I speak to Scandinavian gender quotas. But since the discussion started with the manufactured “boy crisis” in US education, and veered into US colleges and admissions policies, I can say that gender quotas aren’t relevant. Affirmative Action refers to a vast array of court-ordered remedies to discriminatory practices that have been proven in private or governmental organizations. In the US, gender quotas aren’t necessary, because wherever women have not been illegally kept out, they have entered in substantial numbers.
Robert, only private institutions that do not accept federal funding for research are free to do whatever they want. Harvard, for example, receives copious amounts of money for science and medical research that I know of, and no doubt, funding in every department. They are, therefor, bound by nondiscriminatory laws.
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November 21st, 2006 at 8:52 pm
I suspect that as a son of a President and powerful governmental insider, as well as a man of his own complex talents and characteristics, that GW would have done OK regardless of whether Yale had legacy preferences or not. In assessing his career, it’s difficult to see where Yale had much to do with his successes or failures.
No, he had a C average at Andover and if he didn’t go to Yale he wouldn’t have been President and killed 1,000,000 Iraqis and 3,000 Americans, etc. and put this country in debt.
My impression of the Bush boys is that Jeb is certainly more articulate than W, but W has considerably more native intellect. Articulation is not intelligence.
Jeb is more articulate and intellectual. He had an A average (Phi Beta Kappa) and Bush had a C average. Their father wanted Jeb to be President but W ended up being the idiot President we have today.
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November 21st, 2006 at 9:03 pm
An Inauspicious Start at School in Andover
Bush did not get off to an auspicious start when he arrived as at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., as a sophomore or “lower middler” in the school’s vernacular. His first English grade – for an essay on emotions – was zero.
“As I remember, the impression of the red marker was so intense that it stuck out of the back side of the blue book,” recalls Bush. With the help of a thesaurus his mother had given him, Bush had erroneously written about “lacerates” running down his cheek – instead of tears.
“And my math grades weren’t all that good either to begin with. So I was struggling,” said Bush.
Bush kept up with the work but was an average student who never made the honor roll, according to his year book. He was considered a solid athlete – he played varsity basketball and baseball his senior year – but he was never among the class stars.
“George and I were both witness to the fact that Andover has such an excellent academic system and even people at bottom tier – where I was and George was – can be okay and go to good colleges,” said Don Vermeil, a classmate friend who went to Stanford.
Bush would later tell friends he was terrified of flunking out of Andover, afraid that he would embarrass himself and his family. Despite Bush’s private fears and struggles, his classmates – all boys back then – saw him as a larger-than-life Texan – cocky and irrepressible. Within months of his arrival, Bush was seen as a campus mover, not on the strength his intellect or his athletic achievements, but by sheer force of personality. Bush was nicknamed “Lip” because he had an opinion on everything – and sometimes a tongue sharper than necessary.
Bush almost instinctively managed to always be in the center of the action, an ubiquitous, noisy presence at school events. He was the head football cheerleader his senior year, a member of his class rock-and-roll band, the Torqueys – not singing or playing an instrument but clapping – and organizer of the school’s stickball league.
“He was kind to the athletically challenged,” said Wofsey, now a Pennsylvania psychiatrist.
No one thought of him as a class leader in the traditional sense or had any inkling of the career he would ultimately choose.
“I would never have guessed he would go into public service. He never showed the slightest inclination toward it,” said Dan Cooper, the class president. “I would have bet money that he would have turned out to be an investment banker living in Greenwich and happily belonging to the country club.”
Cooper, now head of a Boston multimedia company, was voted Most Respected and Done Most for Andover. Bush came in second for Big Man on Campus.
In his senior year, Bush applied to only two colleges, the University of Texas and Yale. Barbara Bush said in an interview that her son was determined to go to his father’s alma mater, but knew it was not a sure thing that he would be admitted.
“George started hyping up the University of Texas, how he was going to love being a Longhorn,” said Doug Hannah, a Houston friend who talked to Bush over Christmas holidays of his senior year. “My recollection was that he was shocked that he got into Yale.”
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November 21st, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Not smart, athletic or a leader but loud. And a legacy.
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November 21st, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Your faith in the value of a high grade point average is touching. I had a 3.94 undergraduate GPA; I guess I must be the King Shit of all creation - bow before my institutionally-accredited intellectual might!. (And it would have been a 4.0 if it weren’t for oppression from the man.)
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November 21st, 2006 at 9:42 pm
It’s public institutions that are the issue, and as far as I know there are not generally legacy programs at public institutions.
You are incorrect. Kaethe already addressed the ‘public/private’ split, but the University of Michigan (a public institution I think some people might have heard of) unapologetically gives ‘points’ for legacies as well as for students with an enrolled sibling.
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November 21st, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Since you want to continue this discussion…
Bush went to Andover and was an average student. He got into Yale because he was a legacy, not because of his grades, athetic or leadership ability. He got into Harvard because of his continued loudness as a cheerleader on the football field and then his fraternity leadership skills. He wouldn’t have become President if he hadn’t gotten into Yale. He got into Yale just because he was a legacy. Loudness at Andover is not enough to get into Yale. He’s a textbook case of mediocre kids who climb their way to the top because they are legacies.
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November 21st, 2006 at 10:10 pm
It’s public institutions that are the issue, and as far as I know there are not generally legacy programs at public institutions.
Right, Daniel Golden’s book on the subject says the top 100 private and public universities use the legacy model.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 am
I stand corrected vis the public : private distinction. Thank you for the information.
I do not deny that George Bush was a legacy admit to Yale. And undoubtedly that was a helpful place for him to be. His other choice was the University of Texas - not Ivy League, but a fine system nonetheless. His brother went there and seems to have done pretty well, as you yourself keep throwing out there.
I don’t really understand the fixation with grades. Yes, his brother got As while got Cs. His brother was at an easier school. UT is an excellent institution - but it isn’t Yale.
He got into Harvard because of his continued loudness as a cheerleader on the football field and then his fraternity leadership skills.
This seems a rather odd assertion. Have you any evidence to support it?
He got into Harvard because Harvard likes to train men and women who are going to handle millions of dollars, and it was already pretty clear that Bush was the kind of lunatic businessman who certainly would be handling millions of dollars. MBA programs, to my recent knowledge, are not extensively concerned with cheerleading.
If by “fraternity leadership skills” you mean leadership skills acquired in a fraternity, then I would acknowledge that seems to be a supporting element of his successful candidacy to the program. I’m not quite sure why you think having leadership skills is a questionable characteristic.
Look, I will admit - as will he - that the man lived a privileged life and got the best that America had to offer. He was lucky in his choice of family. I really don’t see why that’s considered such a crime in some circles. Everybody’s gotta be born somewhere.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 4:52 am
Kaethe:
Btw, I have not claimed that the current syste in US is meritocratic.
But are you seriously claiming that the concept of meritocracy is about as absurd and unworkable as communism — a system that has killed tens of millions of people — i.e it can never work?
I’m not sure how else am I supposed to read that absurd, outlandish comparison, I’d think that meritocracy would be a rather important concept and a worthy goal for a just society. No, it won’t lead to perfect equality of outcome. I think one of the arguments for AA is that it compensates for lesser opportunity, why not fix the root cause?
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November 22nd, 2006 at 4:54 am
Original Lee asked me a question, I answered it. You can’t accuse me of a thread drift.
Back to US from Europe, then.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 9:07 am
The current system claims to be meritocratic. It is not. The political system of the USSR claimed to be communism. It was not. Actually, communism does tend to work pretty well, as long as you limit it to a pretty tight - knit family. In the case of parents looking after children and elders you see a good example of “from each according to his means to each according to his needs.” The point of my “outlandish comparison” was that even good ideas do not necessarily result in good outcomes. Legacy admissions, for example, have turned elite universities into a system for maintaining an aristocracy.
It may be that “one of the arguments for AA is that it compensates for lesser opportunity”, but I find that a bad argument. It is an emotional argument, and it contains within it the suggestion that anyone aided by AA needed that help because he or she was not otherwise good enough. The reality is that AA, like desegregation plans, are not some sort of hopeful goal, there are specific remedies to specific discrimination. Therefor, colleges who excluded women, or African - Americans, or whomever, people who were fully qualified, who were inarguably, demonstrably qualified according to the findings of a court, must now prove that they are not discriminating. I mentioned that gender quotas aren’t relevant, because in the discussion of US college admissions they aren’t. Although, come to think of it, I suppose they will be, because before too long, someone is going to be demanding that there be quotas to raise the numbers of those boys in crisis.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 9:24 am
communism:
(my emphasis)
Sounds like USSR.
I know there are plenty of apologists (Chomsky etc.) who claim that USSR (and Communist China, Cambodia, North Korea…) are all some “perversions” of communism, but
Um, how can anyone claim that legacy admissions are meritocratic?
By definition, they are not.
Meritocracy:
(my emphasis)
Now, you may say that “but there are no quotas!”, but, in fact, the system of AA strives toward certain “balance” in outcome by manipulating admission on basis of legacy, socioeconomic factors, race and whatever else.
I oppose both legacy AA and racial AA.
Of course, this is all theory, but anyway.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 9:27 am
the sentence ends.
Should read
I know there are plenty of apologists (Chomsky etc.) who claim that USSR (and Communist China, Cambodia, North Korea…) are all some “perversions” of communism, but they actually all represent communism, thus all the oppression is a design feature rather than a mistake or a bug.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 9:33 am
[...] Ampersand has a deeply felt and thoughtful post commenting on on Michael Kimmel’s article, “The Boy Crisis and Anti-Male Ideology.” Kimmel’s analysis of masculinity always brings a much-needed perspective to an issue that is too often presented as a narrow-minded sexist lecture (He wrote the introduction to our own Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes.) [...]
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November 22nd, 2006 at 9:36 am
Kaethe:
Hmm.
Affirmative action:
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November 22nd, 2006 at 2:49 pm
RonF, you’re making perfectly reasonable comments about how you don’t work with girls, but you do with boys, and how important it is to have breaks and time to run around and then you say ” I think the girls would like it, too, although I imagine they’d use the time differently than the boys would. ” Then I have to wonder why you’d say that?
I said that because when I was a kid in K - 8 we had recess and I noted that the boys tended to race around and play games that generally included contact and near-contact (football or “Kill the Guy With the Can”, whereas the girls engaged in more sedate activity - hopscotch and jump rope and the like. When the hill iced up in the winter, the kids sliding down the cement ramp on pieces of corrugated cardboard were all boys. That was a while ago, of course, when girls didn’t get the opportunity to play the same kinds of sports and other physical activities like they do now. But I still think that their social interactions might be different than a group of boys the same age. I could be wrong, though.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Asians have to test higher than whites in elite schools including MIT and the Ivy League.
Any time you want to back up assertions about MIT’s admissions practices with facts, go right ahead. That doesn’t include talking about Ivy League schools and then inferring that MIT’s admissions policies are the same.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 3:11 pm
First, the nature of affirmative action exaggerates the differences in measures of academic success for which it is trying to correct. For instance, students of color, who tend to be poorer, average lower SAT scores than wealthier students. Their lower SAT scores perhaps indicate a lack of opportunity to succeed academically, because of their financial circumstances, more than they suggest an academic deficiency.“
Hm. Define academic deficiency. If by that you mean “lack of achievement”, then I might go along with this statement due to a lack of opportunity noted above. But if it means “lack of ability”, then I’d contest the statement.
The proper weight to give standardized test scores (SAT, ACT, etc.) is a continuing debate. Colleges look at them, but they also look at class rank, what high school you graduated from, what extra curricular activities you engaged in, what community activities you engaged in, what organizations you were active in, how well you can express yourself in a written essay, and whether or not you just were a member of an organization or whether you actually did something.
This is one reason why MIT and other schools try to have their alumni actually interview applicants; it gives you an idea as to the levels of leadership and committment and passion (yes, that is specifically called out in the guide I’m given) that the applicant shows. Say the kid is an Eagle Scout or a Gold Award holder. That looks good on a college application, but in an interview you can gauge for yourself whether or not the kid actually ran their project, or if they were a placeholder while Mom and/or Dad actually did the work.
It’s interesting to see the discussions of “legacies” here. Is there any documentation on what level of influence having a parent or grandparent as an alumni has on college admissions?
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November 22nd, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Robert, only private institutions that do not accept federal funding for research are free to do whatever they want. Harvard, for example, receives copious amounts of money for science and medical research that I know of, and no doubt, funding in every department. They are, therefor, bound by nondiscriminatory laws.
Among others; that’s why Harvard was threatened with the loss of Federal funding when they tried to keep military recruiters off campus (for the Law School, specifically) on the basis that the military discriminates against homosexuals.
Donna, you said that Golden’s book discussed the influence of being a legacy in college admissions. Can you expand on that?
One thing about AA in college admissions is whether or not admitting an underrepresented minority (if we’re in agreement on that term) whose academic preparation is lower than that of other students is doing them any favor. If their education up to that point has been substandard, then they’re going to have to do some make-up work to get up to speed to meet the standard of that school. When you’re talking about MIT or Cal Tech, you have to figure that there’s only so much make-up work that the incoming AA freshman is going to be able to add to the usual freshman studies at that school if they expect to keep up. The Institute does have programs for this; e.g., there are summer sessions for incoming freshman, tutoring, etc. But you can only do so much before it might be more advisable for many incoming students to go to a school where the course of study is not as demanding, but where they have a better chance of catching up. In the long run, it seems to me that an incoming student should go to a school where they would have a good chance of graduating in 4 or 5 years rather than one where they would end up being more likely to flunk out in a year.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 3:45 pm
RonF, either we care about grades as a marker of ‘academic preparation’, or we don’t. If we do, then ANY factor that might make it easier for lower-achieving students to get in is wrong–we’re doing legacies no favors by ushering them into a school over their heads.
Is there any documentation on what level of influence having a parent or grandparent as an alumni has on college admissions?
Universities are notoriously close-mouthed about the details of their admissions process, much less how they whore out the admissions process in the hopes of sucking up to alumni, aka, legacy admissions. They don’t seem to mind publicizing legacies as a marketing tool, mind you.
The Economist has an article touching on the issue (amazingly, as you’d expect them to be all for it), and a recent book discusses exclusionist policies at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 8:31 pm
I do not deny that George Bush was a legacy admit to Yale. And undoubtedly that was a helpful place for him to be. I don’t really understand the fixation with grades. He got into Harvard because of his continued loudness as a cheerleader on the football field and then his fraternity leadership skills. This seems a rather odd assertion. Have you any evidence to support it?
I’m not fixated with grades, you are. He had a C average at Andover so being a legacy is what got him into Yale. He had a C average at Yale and his loudness on the football field sidelines was a lead-in to his being head of the fraternity council at Yale. He was not only President of DKE but of the entire council. Being a legacy gave him the opportunity to become some kind of leader at Yale. Not the typical kind like a debate or political leader and a dubious kind of leadership got him into Harvard. Of course being a legacy not only of his father but other relatives that went to Yale got him into Skull and Bones. These were stepping stones to his Presidency.
He got into Harvard because Harvard likes to train men and women who are going to handle millions of dollars, and it was already pretty clear that Bush was the kind of lunatic businessman who certainly would be handling millions of dollars. MBA programs, to my recent knowledge, are not extensively concerned with cheerleading.
You didn’t read the article, did you? Like I already said, the loudness on the football field sidelines got attention and he became head of DKE and the fraternity leadership council.
If by “fraternity leadership skills” you mean leadership skills acquired in a fraternity, then I would acknowledge that seems to be a supporting element of his successful candidacy to the program. I’m not quite sure why you think having leadership skills is a questionable characteristic.
Like I said, he got there by being loud in general and as a cheerleader on the football field and being head of a fraternity is a social and leadership skill mostly useful in business. I don’t think it’s a questionable characteristic for an MBA. I only bring it up as one of the stepping stones resulting from being a legacy. Being head of the fraternity council is not sufficient leadership training for a US President nowadays which requires a more complex, curious and cosmopolitan mind. Bill Clinton who was a debate champion comes to mind. Hillary Clinton who was head of Yale Law Review also comes to mind.
Look, I will admit - as will he - that the man lived a privileged life and got the best that America had to offer. He was lucky in his choice of family. I really don’t see why that’s considered such a crime in some circles. Everybody’s gotta be born somewhere.
It’s not a crime but there are thousands upon thousands of white men like this who run Wall Street, newspapers, politics, etc. and Bush of course almost ran this country into the ground.
RonF, I think CalTech is one of the three schools that doesn’t have the legacy system. Check out the interview with Daniel Golden at Racialicious.
http://www.racialicious.com/2006/11/21/brand-new-addicted-to-race-episode-out-now-48/
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November 22nd, 2006 at 9:50 pm
I looked through that page but I couldn’t find that particular reference. MIT is on record as saying that they don’t give legacies any special preference in admissions. I wonder if Golden names them or not.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 10:33 pm
It’s a podcast. Click the arrow at the bottom to listen to it. Fascinating.
Amazon review of Daniel Golden’s book:
This comment was written by Donna Darko.A heavy-hitting, name-naming exposé by Wall Street Journal deputy bureau chief Golden concludes that Ivy League admissions offices do not practice meritocracy. Instead, top-drawer schools reward donor-happy alums and the “legacy establishment,” which Golden defines as “elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves.” Moreover, the “preference of privilege” enables wealthy candidates to nose out more deserving working- and middle-class students, especially new immigrants and Asian-Americans. Golden backs his assertions with examples comparing the academic records of entering students: e.g., Al Gore’s son was admitted to Harvard despite his shabby record, although a better prepared Asian-American was rejected at all Ivy Leagues because he was “unhooked” (in admission parlance, not well connected or moneyed). Asian-Americans, notes Golden, are the “new Jews,” for whom a higher bar is set. Golden tracks shameful admissions policies at Duke, where the enrollment of privileged but underqualified applicants has helped elevate the school’s endowment ranking from 25th in 1980 to 16th in 2005; Brown is skewered for courting the offspring of entertainment industry notables. Golden suggests reasonable, workable tactics for resurrecting the antilegacy campaign in Congress (led by Senator Kennedy) and devotes a laudatory chapter to the equitable admissions practices at Caltech, Berea College (Kentucky) and Cooper Union (New York City).
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November 23rd, 2006 at 7:35 am
Tuomas, Wikipedia can be helpful, but it is hardly definitive. NOW gives a nice, brief timeline. Any discussion of AA is problematic, because the thing itself is poorly understood. Because, really, it isn’t any one thing. There are federal laws governing hiringby anyone who accepts federal funding and there are judicial orders covering remedies in discrimination suits against private employers or other entities, and there are non-binding guidelines implemented by others entities to correct real past deficiencies, current inequities, or to achieve other goals.
RonF, a little searching will bring up innumerable studies that drive home the point that AA is pretty much never about letting in unqualified candidates, whether for jobs or education. Reams of documentation.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 9:22 am
RonF, a little searching will bring up innumerable studies that drive home the point that AA is pretty much never about letting in unqualified candidates, whether for jobs or education.
It isn’t a question of unqualified candidates, it’s a question of marginally less qualified candidates. Racial preferences in university admissions presents a distinctive and statistically inevitable profile: people of the preferred race are able to get into a modestly better school than they could have gotten into without the preference. Yale instead of Oberlin; Oberlin instead of Cornell; Cornell instead of UT-Austin; UT-Austin instead of University of Wherever; University of Wherever instead of Franktown Community College.
But the problem is, the racially preferred student is now enrolled in a program aimed at students a bit smarter than he is, and surrounded by students who are a bit better prepared. That has obvious consequences. Those consequences are vividly clear in the statistics for dropouts and lengthy completion times for racial groups which receive preferences in admission.
(Racial preferences in hiring have their own problematic areas, but for a variety of reasons aren’t nearly as destructive to the ambitions of the individuals being “helped”.)
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November 23rd, 2006 at 9:47 am
“But the problem is, the racially preferred student is now enrolled in a program aimed at students a bit smarter than he is, and surrounded by students who are a bit better prepared. ”
I’ll go with “better prepared” but not smarter.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 9:54 am
I’ll go with “better prepared” but not smarter.
Do you think that the typical student at Harvard is smarter than the typical student at Frankstown Community College?
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November 23rd, 2006 at 10:19 am
Richer, certainly, and socio-economic status correlates with academic achievement, no?
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November 23rd, 2006 at 12:02 pm
But in your own example, you said the leap wasn’t from Frankstown to Harvard. You said it was from Oberlin to Harvard (or Yale).
Leading me to say two things:
1) No, I don’t think the average student at Harvard is smarter than the average student at Oberlin. (I was at Sarah Lawrence for a year. We saw lots o’ Yalies. The freshman class was not fully replete with shining examples of brilliant humanity.)
2) By “smarter,” I assume you refer to the idea of an intelligence quotient not in practice but in concept — an innate potential for absorbing new information. If people are less well prepared, i.e. given less opportunity to absorb new information, this would have no effect on their innate potential. So, then, we know they are less well prepared. This can account for all the difference. Why do you also assume they are less smart?
(2a: SATs are a poor measure of ability, but a good measure of preparation.)
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November 23rd, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Why do you also assume they are less smart?
Sense.
Wealth is a factor. Social class is a factor. The intellectual capital possessed by a family (and thus available free to the family’s youngest generation) is a factor. Preparation and quality of the pre-collegiate education is a factor.
The biological spectrum of innate cognitive talent is also a factor, and a major one.
If for ideological, personal, emotional, or whatever other reason, it isn’t possible to discuss this talent differential or to acknowledge its impact, then it’s pointless to have a policy discussion. Intelligence matters.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Wealth is a factor. Social class is a factor. The intellectual capital possessed by a family (and thus available free to the family’s youngest generation) is a factor. Preparation and quality of the pre-collegiate education is a factor.
Cultural capital matters more than innate intelligence in the game of college admission.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 2:21 pm
“Matters more than” != “makes irrelevant”.
It only takes one factor to make a particular school a bad fit for a particular student. The disservice that racial preferences do to people placed outside their range of capability is real.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Cultural capital is something wealthy, well-connected people have. It’s what you said in your post:
Wealth is a factor. Social class is a factor. The intellectual capital possessed by a family (and thus available free to the family’s youngest generation) is a factor. Preparation and quality of the pre-collegiate education is a factor.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Cultural capital is a sociological concept that has gained widespread popularity since it was first articulated by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron first used the term in Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction (1973). In this work he attempted to explain differences in educational outcomes in France during the 1960s. Cultural capital: forms of knowledge; skill; education; any advantages a person has which give them a higher status in society, including high expectations. Parents provide children with cultural capital, the attitudes and knowledge that makes the educational system a comfortable familiar place in which they can succeed easily.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 3:38 pm
“The biological spectrum of innate cognitive talent is also a factor, and a major one”
Fuck you.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Donna: Yes, I know what cultural capital is, thanks. And it is indeed important - and yet, there are plenty of instances where people who don’t have much have succeeded in life because of other attributes (such as a large quantity of raw cognitive talent, or amazing persistence, or excellent planning), and plenty of instances where people with cultural capital dripping out their bottoms have ended in a ditch somewhere. It isn’t dispositive, in other words; just one factor (albeit an important one) among many.
Mandolin: Well, you certainly discredited my argument there. Boy, is my face red.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 9:41 pm
from the feminist blog-o-sphere on the controversy generated by UK politician Jack Straw’s comments about Muslim women and the veil. Redjenny questions the current buzz about women and microcredit (link via the Feminist Toronto blog). Ampersand has a great post on the supposed “boy crisis” in education. Canadian Politics My wonderful friend E. over at Amazing Disgraces has a neat post about Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper’s relationship with the Canadian Jewish community. Harper is an evangelical
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November 23rd, 2006 at 11:09 pm
“But the problem is, the racially preferred student is now enrolled in a program aimed at students a bit smarter than he is, and surrounded by students who are a bit better prepared. ” –Robert
“The biological spectrum of innate cognitive talent is also a factor, and a major one” –Robert
“I’ll go with “better prepared” but not smarter.” –mandolin
Robert, the problem is cultural capital and better preparation not innate intelligence. This doesn’t even include the fact standardized tests are biased towards upper classes. To continuously emphasize innate intelligence is to be like the racist assholes who wrote The Bell Curve. You are therefore behaving like an racist asshole.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:10 pm
“The biological spectrum of innate cognitive talent is also a factor, and a major one” –Robert
“Fuck you.” –mandolin
Do I hear a ban? All say aye.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 12:10 am
To continuously emphasize innate intelligence is to be like the racist assholes…
Why? Or rather, wherein?
I discuss innate intelligence because (unlike human capital in all its glorious varieties) we can semi-objectively test intelligence to a decent first approximation. (Your opinion to the contrary is noted, commonly held, and demonstrably false to fact.) We can also correlate intelligence, reasonably broadly, to the class of school a person attends. Yeah, there are some dumb Yalies and genius community college kids to fuzz up the curves, but the trend is bleeding obvious. Some schools are “smarter” than others.
In addition, intelligence and human capital are different things, even though they work as factors in some of the same equations. There are situations where it doesn’t matter how smart you are, only your human capital is going to help. Other times, it’s quite the reverse. In terms of academic performance, quite often the physical intelligence is the necessary prerequisite to being able to deploy the human capital at all. Your HC may teach you how to most effectively persuade the professor to take you on as a protege - but that will never happen if the professor discovers you’re too dumb to do the basic work of the discipline as she teaches it.
I find intelligence more useful in discussing academic performance, in other words. But if you’d like, we can pretend that intelligence differences between individuals don’t exist. We can put everything on human capital. And if we do that, then the point still stands: putting people in situations they are not equipped for is a disservice to those people. Racial preferences in educational admissions systemically put people in situations they are not equipped for. The reasons for that are structural, not motivational or personal.
In a work environment, those deleterious effects are much alleviated, or even eliminated, because performance is often fuzzily defined and because the workplace is often willing to make a much larger investment in remedial education and human capital infusion than a school can afford to be. In school, the problems are enhanced and made much more evident, which compounds the situation because it creates discouragement in the preferred students - in the workplace, they don’t give out tests with a number grade on it. They do in school, and if you pull an 85 while everyone else pulls a 95, you cannot help but think there’s something wrong with you. When in fact, there is nothing wrong with you, and you’d be getting a 95 if you had the same match between your available human capital and your educational environment as the majority of the non-preferred students, whose institutional decision was not distorted by bonus points, have. (Note that the exact same thing happens to legacy students.)
Please indulge me if I use myself as an example. I got into a very decent liberal arts school - not Harvard, but a damn fine school. My admission was a narrow squeak - I didn’t really have the grades for it, but my SATs were high and I wrote a killer essay. I also got into some other schools, but the school I chose to attend was the best school I could get into. Obviously there are exceptions, but generally speaking, the academic reputation and attainment of a school are primary factors in student decisions. We go to the best place we can get into, even when other considerations loom; I turned down a full-ride scholarship at a less prestigious school. I also applied to a school even better than the one I attended - let’s call it Stanford - but didn’t get in there. If I had gotten into Stanford, I would definitely have attended.
At the school where I barely got in, I earned a C+/B- average, in not particularly challenging coursework, relative to the institution’s offerings, over the two years that I attended before dropping out - despite a high intelligence and a pretty good dollop of human capital, too. I did have a good time, though, and learned a fair amount of things while just getting by. I had a suboptimal match with my institution, but it was (barely) within my capabilities to perform acceptably. (I left for other reasons, and later attended a school which was a better match for my intellectual capacity, and did very well there.)
If I was a member of one of the racial groups which typically receive preferential admission, the odds are very good that I would have gotten into Stanford, too. And I would have gone. And I would have failed egregiously, instead of scraping by for a couple of years and at least learning some stuff, because I was not smart enough (oops, I mean, I didn’t have enough social capital) to go to Stanford. My BEST match was probably the school that offered the scholarship. If I’d attended there, odds are good I would have gotten a 3.6 and graduated in four years.
To broaden it into a “racial” group, consider the spectrum of ability and capital possessed by any arbitrary group of 18-year old college prospects. Some dummies on one end, some geniuses at the other end, a bunch of people lumped in the middle of that awful racist bell curve - a standard distribution, in other words, of the sort that we see all the time.
The kids at the right-hand edge of the curve are going to Yale and MIT and Stanford. They have the brains and the preparation, so off they go. Well done. The folks a little bit further left didn’t quite make the MIT cut, but they’re off to Cornell and Oberlin. A bit further left and we find people hitting the medium quality liberal arts schools. We keep going and the quality of the school that people are going to attend tends downwards as we continue leftward on the curve. There are obviously some exceptions; some of the MIT guys end up at Cornell because they get a scholarship or want to study with a particular prof. Some of the State U-bound gals actually end up at Oberlin because they got great test scores. And so forth - but basically, people sort themselves according to their own knowledge, and the schools sort them based on their knowledge, and a mishmash of outcomes results wherein most folks are going to a more or less appropriate educational institution.
Now imagine that we take this arbitrary group, and in addition to the schools that they have gained admission to, we say “oh, and by the way, you also got admitted to school X” - where school X is a school in the next tier up. That’s the effect that any preference generally has - it opens an opportunity at a level you didn’t quite make on your own. Not all of the students will take their new opportunity. Most will.
And many if not most of that group will fail.
We know that many if not most of them will fail because that is what happens. People who get racial preferences turn in dreadful statistics on completion and performance in academia. So much so that the schools themselves hate to talk about it - it makes them look incompetent or dishonest (which, largely, they are being). (”Why did you admit that person if you didn’t think they could cut it?” “We thought they could cut it.” “How did other people in the same boat do in the past?” “They failed out too.” “Then why do you think that another generation will do any better?” “Because it would be racist not to think that!”)
The tragic irony is this: racial preferences are not necessary to get members of minority groups into elite institutions, or quality institutions, or adequate institutions. Members of minority groups have earned admissions to colleges and universities at all levels ever since the racist restrictions on their attendance were lifted. Racial preferences are the tool that institutions use to increase their own racial minority presence - to look good on paper, as a progressive and non-racist institution. Which is well and good - but the cost of the policy isn’t paid by the institutions, it’s paid by the students. It’s paid by the really bright black kid who would do great at Cornell but fails out of Yale. It’s paid by the decently bright Hispanic kid who would do great at UT but fails out of Cornell. It’s paid by the adequate fill-in-the-blank kid who would have done fine at Oklahoma State but who can’t cut it at UT. (The genius kid who would have been at Yale anyway is largely unaffected, other than whatever psychic cost there is to having people think he or she is there because of preferences instead of raw merit. Which I don’t know the magnitude of, but which I assume is nonzero.)
Please notice that this effect occurs regardless of whether the racial group being preferred has higher or lower intelligence or social capital or ANYTHING than the majority population. Give racial preferences to rich white kids, and rich white kids will start flunking out of college in higher numbers. So please feel free to decide that I am personally a ‘orible racist bigot - but please also be aware that doesn’t make a sparrow’s fart worth of difference in whether or not the effect occurs. Racist society or non-racist society, dumb minorities or genius minorities or average minorities - group preferences that encourage selection of mismatched performance-based institutions will fuck up group outcomes and performance, guaranteed. It doesn’t really matter too much if Whitey McRichfuck fails out of Harvard; he’s going to go work for Daddy at the investment bank anyway. It matters a great deal when someone who’s the first in the family to go to college gets the shaft.
Racial preferences in education in essence make white-run institutions look progressive and racially sensitive, and do so by fucking over the career prospects and life paths of their minority students. I don’t believe this to be the best way of raising the level of minority academic performance. If that makes me racist, I’ve been called worse things for worse causes.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 12:32 am
If I was a member of one of the racial groups which typically receive preferential admission, the odds are very good that I would have gotten into Stanford, too. And I would have gone. And I would have failed egregiously, instead of scraping by for a couple of years and at least learning some stuff, because I was not smart enough (oops, I mean, I didn’t have enough social capital) to go to Stanford. My BEST match was probably the school that offered the scholarship. If I’d attended there, odds are good I would have gotten a 3.6 and graduated in four years.
To broaden it into a “racial” group, consider the spectrum of ability and capital possessed by any arbitrary group of 18-year old college prospects. Some dummies on one end, some geniuses at the other end, a bunch of people lumped in the middle of that awful racist bell curve - a standard distribution, in other words, of the sort that we see all the time.
You’re not a person of color. You would not have had the same life up to the age of eighteen if you had been a person of color. Like someone said earlier, it’s a fallacy that people of color who get spots at elite schools take the place of a white person.
The tragic irony is this: racial preferences are not necessary to get members of minority groups into elite institutions, or quality institutions, or adequate institutions. Members of minority groups have earned admissions to colleges and universities at all levels ever since the racist restrictions on their attendance were lifted.
Again, the cultural capital (not “social capital” or “human capital” as you called it) factor is very important in admissions. Elite schools are also inhospitable places for many people of color so they actively recruit them. Many of the brightest black students go to HBCUs because they know elite white schools are inhospitable to people of color. So some people of color are admitted whether or not there are preferences but there need to be alot more people of color at elite universities.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 12:34 am
You’re behaving in a racist manner whether you realize/acknowledge it or not.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 12:58 am
It’s much more likely you were replaced by a less-deserving white male legacy.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 1:31 am
there need to be alot more people of color at elite universities.
As far as I can see, the direct, obvious, and systemically positive way to achieve that goal is to do two things:
* raise the median academic attainment and cultural capital (I welcome your term as being inclusive) of youthful people of color to the level where the natural race-blind outcome of admissions decisions permits it - basically, the 50th-65th percentile range. At that level, there are lots and lots of really high-CC kids and they have great prospects, and absolute hordes of reasonably high-CC kids who can do very well. Broadly speaking I know how to do that but it requires a cultural change of seemingly unlikely vastness.
* ensure that the material resources are made available as needed to ensure that sufficient aid money to students is available so that nobody is settling for State solely because they can’t afford Harvard. (Note: to students, not to institutions. The current policy of giving money straight to the schools is fostering an absolutely awful inflationary policy for college education. For complex but uncontroversially existential economic reasons, it just works far better to put the money straight into the student’s hands, even if it’s a voucher rather than cash.) This one is easy: we tax people and give the money to other people. If we do this intelligently, people won’t mind too much, particularly if the money comes from some other part of the education leviathan.
* ensure that elite institutions, like all institutions, generally have a policy of warmly welcoming members of all social groups qua groups. I honestly have no idea at all how to do that.
That’s my two (three) cents.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 2:38 am
All you’ve done on this thread is talk out of your ass due to a racist belief that it was nonwhite not an affluent white legacy that kept you out of a college. The best way to solve the lack of diversity problem is funding public schools equally. Quality of public schools depends mostly on property taxes. So New Trier in suburban Illinois is always in the top and schools in poor areas are the worst. All the property taxes or taxes for public schools should be pooled into one public school fund. Suburban schools should not be better than schools in poor areas. You can’t raise peoples’ cultural capital without radically changing this country so that all races are equal. Cultural capital is forms of knowledge, skill, education, any advantages a person has which give them a higher status in society, including high expectations. Parents provide children with cultural capital, the attitudes and knowledge that makes the educational system a comfortable familiar place in which they can succeed easily. It would take generations before nonwhites have the same cultural capital as whites.
ensure that the material resources are made available as needed to ensure that sufficient aid money to students is available so that nobody is settling for State solely because they can’t afford Harvard. (Note: to students, not to institutions. The current policy of giving money straight to the schools is fostering an absolutely awful inflationary policy for college education. For complex but uncontroversially existential economic reasons, it just works far better to put the money straight into the student’s hands, even if it’s a voucher rather than cash.) This one is easy: we tax people and give the money to other people. If we do this intelligently, people won’t mind too much, particularly if the money comes from some other part of the education leviathan.
You’re constantly talking out of your ass about a subject you know very little about except from your own bitter, racist belief that nonwhites “kept you down”. From what you’ve written, it’s much more likely a less-qualified white male legacy kept you down. The following elite schools have a “need-blind” policy meaning anyone can apply and be admitted without revealing their financial situation. Elite schools pay for this democratic model from their considerable endowments.
* Amherst College
* Brown University
* California Institute of Technology
* Columbia University
* Cornell University
* Dartmouth College
* Duke University
* Georgetown University
* Harvard University
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology
* Middlebury College
* Pomona College
* Princeton University
* Rice University
* Stanford University
* Swarthmore College
* University of Chicago
* University of Pennsylvania
* Wellesley College
* Wesleyan University
* Williams College
* Yale University
*ensure that elite institutions, like all institutions, generally have a policy of warmly welcoming members of all social groups qua groups. I honestly have no idea at all how to do that.
The best way to increase diversity is to equally fund public schools and make our society truly inclusive and anti-racist. Of course, you’ve made this all about you. White men always have to re-center themselves in feminist or poc spaces. You haven’t given any thought about race while at the same time you blame nonwhites for your situation. Of course, you never blamed the most likely culprit, the white legacy who took your place.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 2:45 am
Any student admitted through the need-blind model at any of the aforementioned elite schools have their tuition and room and board paid by these schools’ endowments.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Donna,
Your description of Robert’s participation in this thread:
seems way off target. While it is conceivable that Robert feels this way, I don’t see anything in this thread that suggests that. Robert talked about getting into and going to a school where he was beyond his abilities, where he did badly and eventually dropped out. Robert didn’t get bumped out of any college that he thinks he could have done well in, instead he thinks he got accepted to a college that shouldn’t have accepted him. He used this as an example of why it is bad for schools to systematically accept a group of students based on any criteria other than expected ability to perform academically.
If anything, by Robert’s argument, Robert was kept down by a societal preference for white men like himself (not just a societal preference for richer and more powerful white men e.g legacy admissions). If white men hadn’t been viewed so favorably in his high school, he might well have gotten worse recommendations, he might well have gotten worse grades, he might have had it suggested that he take less difficult classes, he might have gotten less personal attention from individual teachers, etc, and he might well have been rejected by Oberlin and gone to a school a tier lower and done far better. Of course, were white men a hated racial group, he might well have gotten a worse education and have been less prepared for a college where, again, he would have been part of a hated racial group.
This comment was written by Charles S.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 6:28 am
Umm, things seem to have gone decidedly anti white male here, as one of the afforementioned group I would like to have an input.
I went to a comprehensive school (UK based, public means a private school), in a deprived area. Myself and others in my year worked our asses off to get top grades (We have tests in our 4th year of high school, our 5th and 6th, normally 8,5,3 split as courses get harder / more specialised). I then applied to univeristies and was accepted by essentially any university I applied to due to grades. I even managed to acquire both univeristy scholarship and company sponsorship for my education again from grades and interviews. Now the interesting thing is that had I been female and or non-white I could have received an extra £2000/£1500 a year (I currently receive around £2500 a year in scholarhsip, so ~ $4000, $3000 and $5000 in USD).
Now I am sure that someone here will jump on me, I am a privelaged white male, I got good grades in a poor school, I got sponsored by universities and companies to do it, however there were 3 factors in this, 1) innate ability (I stopped studying after the 4th year exams realising it made no difference to my results), 2)I worked my butt off during the year, 3) Parental support for my education (parental encouragement rather than monetary).
Now I am sure that I would have gotten the same education had I been female / black / a strange alien from outer space since everyone in my area had the chance to go to the same school, we got the same course choices (and before someone says women would be stopped from going into xyz my teachers, guidance personnel and headteachers all tried to stop me doing the courses I picked and indeed the number I picked in my 6th year. I decided to do them and they fit the curriculum and timetable so I did them, end of story). Innate ability is something that cannot really be adjusted for, there are people who are naturally gifted at things, I can’t keep a rhythm and suck generally at drawing. Parental encouragement I will say I had better than average support, my parents really did encourage me to work and try.
I am sure there is some discrimination in acceptance policy, most hard science courses will take women in preference to men, my university has a tacit foreign students before domestic (they pay more) etc… However the key point I want to make is that if you try hard, achieve and apply then you won’t be discriminated against, they will accept you regardless of your skin tone, ethnicity or gender.
I am also expecting to be jumped on, poor white male complains about AA, SD, yadda yadda, well quite frankly why should I be put down so that someone who is supposedly my equal can be elevated. I have read the male, white etc privelage lists, and to be honest I have not experienced these benefits. When I go out I do worry about being mugged, I remain vigelant and when in areas where these events are common I am prepared. Social standing does have benefits and flaws, that doesn’t mean that someone at the bottom of the ladder can’t reach the top. Though to be honest if I was in one of these “minority” groups I would be offended (and mercenary enough to take it) that someone thought that the “majority” was better than me and that I needed a hand up. I hate it when someone assumes that I need help because I am young, I hate it when people assume I won’t beat them senseless if they attack me because I am overweight, I hate it when people try and cast me in a mold, people are individual, a meritocracy is the way to go, of course MONEY / FAVOURS will buy you bonuses however the rest of us are on an even footing struggling through the public system and trying to make the best of it.
Thank you for reading this far,
“Privelaged” “White” Male
This comment was written by Chris.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 9:10 am
What Charles said. Thank you, Charles.
As far as I know, I’ve never been the un-beneficiary of any racially oriented program. (In fact, the contrary, as I got ethnic scholarships.) My interest is purely impersonal.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 10:42 am
If amp wishes to ban me, that’s certainly his perrogative. I’m aware of the moderation rules.
I’m also aware that some people hide under civility to make noxious arguments — such as that it’s only “sense” to assume that people of color are less smart than white people and that therefore “innate biological capacity is a major factor” in the (supposed lack) of people of color’s intelligence.
Since I’ve seen the concept well addressed here and elsewhere in threads in which Robert has participated or that were posted during a time in which he was an active member of the boards, the problem is not that Robert is unaware of the fact his opinion is scientifically and sociologically unsupportable. Nor is he unaware of the fact that he is posting a deeply offensive sentiment — again, baldly, that he believes people of color are less smart than whites.
Profanity alone has not constituted banning in the past - for instance, the thread in which greenconsciousness posted her anti-arab rant was treated as an instance where the breach of civility was posed through outwardly civil words.
And I do not feel that my post lacks content. I think it explains precisely the level of argumentative engagement required by the statement that “innnate biological capacity is a major factor” in determining why people of color are “out of their depth” in academic institutions they’ve been able to gain entrance to in part because of affirmative action.
If the moderator deems this statement of Robert’s is less offensive than an unequivocal and profane dismissal, so be it, but I disagree.
And I will not be posting in this thread again, so feel free to retort.
This comment was written by mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Mandolin, I’m not going to rephrase it for you, but your interpretation of what I’m saying isn’t anything like what I’m saying. The phenomenon I decry operates independently of whether there are any racial differences in intelligence. Innate biological capacity is an individual variable, not a group one.
That said, I don’t think Donna was calling for you to be banned, I think she was calling for me to be banned.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Robert, there’s a few unsupported statements I’d like to address.
This is bunk. Because, when it comes to higher education, there really is no good way for a prospective student to compare them. US News & World Report rankings suggest some schools might be better in some ways, but the colleges have been gaming those rankings for years. There simply is no objective assessment of college education. The collective conviction that Harvard is the pinnacle can’t really be supported by anything. The best publicity for Harvard is that many more students apply than could possibly be accepted every year. There is tremendous prestige to attending Harvard, but there is nothing to support the widely held idea that it is “best.” Contra conventional wisdom, it may be that the best educated graduates come from small and unrespected colleges, rather than from universities. In the latter, students are more likely to take large survey courses taught by graduate students who are overworked and poorly paid, whereas in small colleges the faculty are more likely to be teaching their subjects. But again, there is no objective standard. What makes a school best?
Not true. Recent years have seen a large upswing in college completion rates among whites entering, which creates a gap, even though black completion rates are also increasing, just not as much. (Actually, it’s the “boy crisis” again, where black males are least likely to complete, well-off white boys quite likely, girls of any race most likely) There’s no research to support your assertion.
As to income factors in freshpeople that might determine their ability to thrive in a given college setting: admissions officers don’t have a clue. There is some research showing that family wealth is a factor, as far as affording not just tuition and board and books and activity fees, but also the variables of clothing and transportation and entertainment. Dogged persistence appears to be way out in front of intelligence as far as determining completion, by the way. Despite a widespread love for the “idea” of natural talent, studies across a broad spectrum of disciplines make it clear that actual time spent doing X is a greater factor than any supposed talent.
Your elaborate bell curve of IQ as it relates to admissions is interesting, but unsupported. Of all possible factors relating to college admission/completion that have been studied, I think there is less support for IQ than anything else.
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Kaethe, I don’t think it matters that there aren’t good objective standards for ranking schools; people do it regardless. Despite the lack of objectivity, there does nonetheless appear to be a broad correlation between reputation and academic rigor. Brownsville Community College is not secretly a bastion of high-powered research and education; Harvard is not full of idiots.
The ratchet effect is well supported in the research literature, as are the problematic collegiate performances recorded by members of preferred groups. I have seen reports that completion rates are upticking across all groups; since those rates are up for all groups, the strong implication is that something systemic is making college easier to complete for everyone. That could be something positive (more effective counseling and advising) or something negative (colleges just making things less rigorous across the board) or a combination of things. I welcome your theory as to how a systemwide improvement indicates the lack of a ratchet effect.
I quite agree that dogged persistence is probably the largest single factor in college completion.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Can you not see that these three statements together are nonesence? What broad correlation between reputation and academic rigor? Find me a reference to anything that can demonstrate this broad correlation that also accounts for expectations. High-powered research is largely a function of funding at the graduate and post-graduate level. Universities with substantial enowments and/or sufficient reputations can attract the researchers and graduate students who have already attracted funding. No community college is even in the running. Likewise education != research. Particularly if you are expecting research to have a direct positive effect on undergraduate education. Finally, on the basis of Summers’ tenure, I would need to see some very convincing evidence to change my mind that Harvard is in fact full of idiots.
I don’t have the foggiest idea what “the ratchet effect” means in the context we’re talking about. For data on the not at all problematic collegiate performances by preferred groups at elite universities, I suggest you look at The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions a longitudinal study (1976 and 1989) by William Bowen and Derek Bok. A JAMA article from Oct 1997 of a longitudinal study of med students admitted with special consideration, including race, concluded:
Until I see documentation to the contrary, I will go with the research I have seen on AA, which shows that it works very well at ameliorating discrimination without ill effects, and without decreasing standards.
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Find me a reference to anything that can demonstrate this broad correlation that also accounts for expectations.
The observed behavior of millions of students, parents and academics is good enough for me. YMMV.
I don’t have the foggiest idea what “the ratchet effect” means in the context we’re talking about.
The ratchet effect is what I’ve been talking about in this post - how preferences on a criteria unrelated to academic ability damage the people who get them by mis-sorting them into schools that aren’t good matches.
For data on the not at all problematic collegiate performances by preferred groups at elite universities…
Uh huh.
It is, actually, true that at the very top tier of universities - although how you know to call them “elite” given your stated position on the question of assessing collegiate quality - preferred groups do OK. (Probably because most of the students at the very highest tier would be there anyway.) But we’re talking about a literal handful of schools. The statistics for preferred groups in the entire system are sick-making to anyone who cares about the status of minority groups in our society. If you seriously don’t know that, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Until I see documentation to the contrary, I will go with the research I have seen on AA, which shows that it works very well at ameliorating discrimination without ill effects, and without decreasing standards.
I’m not sure what your quote from Shape of the River is supposed to indicate; of course you can find criteria other than GPA and test scores to predict success. Has anyone denied that?
As for the documentation, here you go. It’s a pretty comprehensive review of affirmative action in university admissions.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Mandolin, I wanted Robert to be banned for his racism, not you.
Robert, so you had high SATs, a “killer” essay but subpar grades for the first college you went to. You can’t conflate your experience with experiences of all nonwhites especially since the reverse is usually true. Standardized tests are biased towards whites and the upper classes so they are usually admitted with better grades than scores and probably a “killer” essay and “killer” recommendations. I find it obnoxious and racist for you to say that because you didn’t measure up at your first college and dropped out you can speak for all people of color at elite colleges! If you had a higher intelligence than performance, it was due to work habits not innate intelligence. White men continuously re-center themselves in feminist and nonwhite discussions. Furthermore, this post is about the “boy crisis” in schools which mostly affects poor, Latino and black boys and white men have re-centered themselves and made a mostly class and race discussion about themselves.
Please indulge me if I use myself as an example. I got into a very decent liberal arts school - not Harvard, but a damn fine school. My admission was a narrow squeak - I didn’t really have the grades for it, but my SATs were high and I wrote a killer essay. I also got into some other schools, but the school I chose to attend was the best school I could get into. Obviously there are exceptions, but generally speaking, the academic reputation and attainment of a school are primary factors in student decisions. We go to the best place we can get into, even when other considerations loom; I turned down a full-ride scholarship at a less prestigious school. I also applied to a school even better than the one I attended - let’s call it Stanford - but didn’t get in there. If I had gotten into Stanford, I would definitely have attended.
At the school where I barely got in, I earned a C+/B- average, in not particularly challenging coursework, relative to the institution’s offerings, over the two years that I attended before dropping out - despite a high intelligence and a pretty good dollop of human capital, too. I did have a good time, though, and learned a fair amount of things while just getting by. I had a suboptimal match with my institution, but it was (barely) within my capabilities to perform acceptably. (I left for other reasons, and later attended a school which was a better match for my intellectual capacity, and did very well there.)
If I was a member of one of the racial groups which typically receive preferential admission, the odds are very good that I would have gotten into Stanford, too. And I would have gone. And I would have failed egregiously, instead of scraping by for a couple of years and at least learning some stuff, because I was not smart enough (oops, I mean, I didn’t have enough social capital) to go to Stanford. My BEST match was probably the school that offered the scholarship. If I’d attended there, odds are good I would have gotten a 3.6 and graduated in four years.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
the “boy crisis” is virtually all among boys from lower-income families and boys of color. –original post
Yet at least 55 of the 100 comments here are from white men.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 24th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
If white men want to address the part of the post that concerns them, they should discuss the anti-maleness behind the “boy crisis” panic. They should discuss how they can dismantle traditional masculinity that makes school girl’s work not real work. Anti-maleness is believing boys cannot sit still with the girls and have to run around the playground to work off testosterone or only partake in “hands-on” learning. Because that’s what real men do.
It is not the school experience that “feminizes” boys, but rather the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed. “The work you do here is girls’ work,” one boy commented to a researcher. “It’s not real work.”
“Real work” involves a confrontation — not with feminist women, whose sensible educational reforms have opened countless doors to women while closing off none to men — but with an anachronistic definition of masculinity that stresses many of its vices (anti-intellectualism, entitlement, arrogance, and aggression) but few of its virtues. When the self-appointed rescuers demand that we accept boys’ “hardwiring,” could they possibly have such a monochromatic and relentlessly negative view of male biology? Maybe they do. But simply shrugging our collective shoulders in resignation and saying “boys will be boys” sets the bar much too low. Boys can do better than that. They can be men.
Perhaps the real “male bashers” are those who promise to rescue boys from the clutches of feminists. Are males not also “hardwired” toward compassion, nurturing, and love? If not, would we allow males to be parents?
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 2:01 am
Robert,
Your comprehensive review is a non-peer reviewed position piece from the Cato Institute, arguing that AA should be replaced with school vouchers at the pre-college level. It cites heavily from newspaper articles and non-peer reviewed publications from other right wing think tanks. It attempts to use the rachet effect at selective schools (representing < 10% of all black and hispanic students, ~50% of whom (according to the Cato Institute writer) would still be in selective schools without AA) to explain the relatively poor performance of black and hispanic students at non-selective schools. Removing AA would have an effect of only a few % at most on performance at non-selective schools. This is shoddy and biased work.
Intriguingly, it also relies heavily on the idea of stereotype threat.
[Edited to fix the missing half of the comment]
This comment was written by Charles S.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 9:22 am
Biased, no doubt - Cato certainly has a point of view, as do the previous works and authors cited here. Shoddy? I’d need something other than your unvarnished word for that. It’s a review piece designed to present a point of view, not a peer-reviewed journal article, so critiquing it for including references to news sources for relevant events of the day seems odd.
I find it obnoxious and racist for you to say that because you didn’t measure up at your first college and dropped out you can speak for all people of color at elite colleges!
Obnoxious I’ll grant you. Racist? Once again, wherein?
I’m not claiming to “speak for” anyone. I shared my own experience because I am one of the people whose admission decision took place in the margin under discussion, and it’s thus a good case in point for the principle under discussion.
Yet at least 55 of the 100 comments here are from white men.
And the rest are from women. If it’s wrong for white men to chime in on the boy crisis because we’re only part of it instead of the main event, where exactly does the relevance of distaff opinion come in? “Shut up, you marginally relevant contributors! You’re shutting out the discourse from the people who are even less related to the primary issue than you are!”
They should discuss how they can dismantle traditional masculinity that makes school girl’s work not real work. Anti-maleness is believing boys cannot sit still with the girls and have to run around the playground to work off testosterone or only partake in “hands-on” learning.
Where to begin.
“Anti-maleness” is being opposed to males. Holding a particular opinion or set of observations about how boys learn is not “anti-male” unless that opinion is “I hate boys and I wish they would stop trying to learn”, or the like.
There are boys (and girls) who can’t sit still and who learn best from hands-on experiences. What’s wrong with acknowledging that, and with ensuring that kids get the pedagogy that works best for them? If it turns out that boys learn best by hanging upside down in a dark closet while the instructor drums the lesson in Morse Code, great. There is a big variety of optimal learning styles out there. Any gendered differentiation of those styles is morally certain to fall into the category of “10% of boys are active learners, while 5% of girls are. 7% of boys are auditory learners, while 9% of girls are. 14% of boys are…” In other words, you need the variety of pedagogical styles because both boys and girls have a variety of pedagogical needs.
What is anti-male, in my view, is setting up a theoretical construction of what maleness ought to be, and then ignoring or punishing any boy who fails to conform. That’s wrong when the jock culture tortures sensitive and gentle boys, and it’s wrong when feminist educators get pissed off at boys for not wanting to sit quietly with the girls and read.
Because that[being physically active and doing hands-on activities]’s what real men do.
Well? Yeah, it is. It’s what “real women” do, too. And then some real men and some real women don’t do that. Maybe patriarchal conditioning reduces women’s activity in these spheres and artificially promotes men’s - but that’s a problem with patriarchy, not a problem with activity and experiential learning.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Robert wrote:
Then, in a later post:
Before I answer this, I want to make sure that I’m looking at the right thing. Is the section entitled “dropout rates,” beginning on page 6, the empirical documentation for your claim that affirmative action causes an increase in minority dropout rates?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Donna, I’m really glad you’re posting here. But your claims about Robert’s motivation are flat-out wrong; nothing in what he’s written here indicates that he thinks he would have gotten into Stanford if only AA didn’t exist. From what he’s written here, Robert clearly thinks he shouldn’t have gotten into Stanford.
With all due respect, I wish you’d continue attacking Robert’s arguments (which you’ve been doing a great job at!) but stop speculating about his motivations, as much as possible.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Racial preferences in admission decisions, not affirmative action.
The Cato report isn’t where I first heard of the idea, but the research (Light and Strayer) they present seems to support the concept. (Audrey Light and Wayne Strayer, “Determinants of College Completion: School Quality or Student Ability?” Journal of Human Resources 35 (2000): 315.
In other words, if you disprove Light and Strayer you don’t necessarily disprove what I’m saying, but you would put a ding in it. I looked online, but unless you have a JSTOR subscription it isn’t available.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
What’s the distinction, in your view? (I’d call the former a subset of the latter.)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Racial preferences can be a component of affirmative action, but you can have an AA program without them. Advertising in minority publications, creation of minority student support offices, building networks of minority alums and hooking them into the recruiting and admissions office, etc.
“Weak” AA (no preferences) is generally a good thing and I support it. Thus the perhaps-unnecessary qualification that my opposition extends only to racial preferences in admission.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Well, see what you’re offering as a “reference” is your opinion of the observed…..and that is not good enough for me.
They are elite schools because the reject a greater percentage of applicants than others. They are elite schools because they take in the children of the elite. They are elite schools because they say they are. They are elite schools because our culture says so.
I suggest, again, that you point to any such statistics.
My quote was not from Shape of the River, my quote was from JAMA. Your article from the Cato Institute does in fact deny that, it states that the relative position of one’s test score to the rest of one’s classmates is the single greatest indicator of success, in this case, graduating. The article was rather obviously slanted opinion piece. It was neither comprehensive, nor a useful review. When something A) contradicts the majority of reviewed research and B) is used as an argument for dismantling something that seems to be working very well and C) is just patronizing as hell about the people it supposedly is trying to help, then I feel confident calling it rubbish.
Which strawfeminist educators are these who believe that all girls sit quietly and all boys cannot? In your made up examples of pedagogical styles that work best you concede that the differences between the sexes would be significantly less than the differences within either sex. So, either you realize that there are boys AND girls who like to run around at recess, or you assume that ALL boys want to run around and ALL girls want to sit quietly and read. Please make up your mind.
Am I the only one who read that article and thought, poor Mr. President, it must have been so damaging to his self-esteem to attend Harvard and Yale, all the while knowing that the only reason he got in wasn’t his intelligence or preparedness, but racial preferences? Oh, no, that wasn’t true, because AA harms minors by putting them amid their betters, but take a wealthy WASP and put him in a school over his head, and no one assumes he got in on racial preferences.
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
I think I should rephrase my question. I wrote:
I’m not asking if that’s all the empirical documentation that could possibly exist in the world; I’m asking if you agree that’s the empirical documentation that you’ve provided in this thread to back up your “ratchet effect” claim, or if there’s some other empirical documentation that you’ve provided in this thread which you think I have to address?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Hi, Donna - sorry I misunderstood.
Hi, Robert - sorry I misunderstood you, also.
I guess I don’t understand why you chose to phrase things the way you did, but I’ll take your word that you don’t believe there is a variation between the average intelligence of socially constructed races.
This comment was written by mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Kaethe:
Speaking of straw, Robert never said anything about “all boys” or “all girls.” Differences in averages between groups are perfectly consistent with considerable overlap.
What does that mean, exactly? It seems to me that differences between sexes are generally expressed as scalars (e.g., the difference between the average male height and average female height is 6″), while differences within sexes are expressed in terms of distributions (e.g., height is normally distributed among men with mean of 5′10″ and a standard deviation of 2″). I don’t see how you can meaningfully say that one is greater than the other.
This comment was written by Brandon Berg.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
No, that’s all I’ve pointed to in this thread.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Any student admitted through the need-blind model at any of the aforementioned elite schools have their tuition and room and board paid by these schools’ endowments.
Ah, Donna, if only that were true. No, once admitted to one of these schools, you file go through the same financial aid process as you do at any other school. The school decides what you can pay. If that amount is less than what they charge for tuition/fees/room and board, they make up the difference in grants and loans.
They are elite schools because the reject a greater percentage of applicants than others. They are elite schools because they take in the children of the elite. They are elite schools because they say they are. They are elite schools because our culture says so.
They are elite schools because they take in the best and the brightest of all the young people every year who apply to college and both have and use resources other schools don’t have to give students educational opportunities they can’t get elsewhere.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Brandon Berg,
Since Robert did not specify who these feminist educators are, or that they only get pissed off at some boys who don’t sit quietly with some girls, it is not stretching things to read this as construing all boys and all girls. If he meant something different, he can explain.
Robert wrote
I assume that the statement in quotations is not an exact quote from any source, but a statement of what sort of numbers one might see. To use the first example, if 10% of boys are active learners then 90% of boys are not. Likewise, if 5% of the girls are also active learners, then 95% of the girls are not. There is a difference in learning style within the set of girls or boys, while the difference between the two sets is small. Twice as many of our hypothetical boys as girls are active learners, but they are still a small group against the much larger group of non-active learners. So, what I’m wondering here is, what is the point? Unless Robert is specifying that only poor and/or minority boys are in these small groups who need different pedagogical methods, then what is the argument? Am I misreading this? Was it meant only as a statement that there are more ways of teaching than quietly reading, in which case, I don’t think anyone would disagree. But the feminist educators statement seemed to counter this idea, showing a scenario in which feminist educators are doing harm to all boys by demanding that only one form of teaching be used.
I may be reading this wrong. Certainly, I am confused by this. Feel free to show me where I’m wrong, if I am.
RonF, if you say that the elite schools are elite because they take in the best and brightest, what does that mean? Quantifying “best and brightest ” is a bitch, as this lengthy discussion of admissions shows. Is it true just because they say it is? And if that is true, which demonstrably, it isn’t, see the above-cited discussions of legacy admissions and athletic preferences in elite schools, but if it were true then wouldn’t preferences of any sort be unnecessary? Because one would expect there to be proportionately the same number of “best and brightest” in every race, in every geographical area, in every economic group. Which would bring us back to the supposition that elite schools are meritocratic, yet, they are not. It’s a vacuous circle.
From what I’ve seen, once adjustments are made for starting advantages, graduates of elite schools don’t do better than graduates of other schools in terms of earnings (Krueger 1999) or happiness (Lowenstein or Gilbert on affective forecasting). I don’t discount the possibility of opportunities on offer that aren’t available elsewhere, but other than networking and/or graduate school recommendations, I haven’t heard what they might be. There’s prestige out the wazoo, I know, but what evidence that they are better?
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
Well, see what you’re offering as a “reference” is your opinion of the observed…..and that is not good enough for me.
OK…
They are elite schools because the reject a greater percentage of applicants than others. They are elite schools because they take in the children of the elite. They are elite schools because they say they are. They are elite schools because our culture says so.
So it isn’t “my opinion”. It’s the collective opinion of our culture, coupled with some metrics.
I suggest, again, that you point to any such statistics.
Sure. A lot of the good stuff is locked up behind proprietary interfaces, but there are some public statistics out there. Here’s an article reporting on a UCLA national study of completion rates and race. From that article:
The Census Bureau says that about 2.3 million black people are in college right now. That means around 230,000 additional black people who are currently in college right now aren’t going to graduate, compared to whites and Asians. The situation is worse for Hispanics and indigenous Americans.
In terms of things like class standing and GPA, I don’t have multiracial statistics but black students overall have GPAs about 2/3 of a point lower than non-minority students. Those who graduate finish at an average of the 25th percentile or below in terms of class standing. (Those stats are in the Cato report I linked. They are ultimately sourced to Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington: Brookings
Institution Press, 1998) Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom,
“Reflections on the Shape of the River,” UCLA Law Review 46 (1999). Sorry not to have something online, but the Thernstrom book should be widely available.
My quote was not from Shape of the River, my quote was from JAMA. Your article from the Cato Institute does in fact deny that, it states that the relative position of one’s test score to the rest of one’s classmates is the single greatest indicator of success, in this case, graduating.
My apologies for the misreading of the titles.
Stating that something is the best indicator of something is not the same thing as saying that there are no other indicators. You are asserting that authors have said something which in fact they have not said.
So, either you realize that there are boys AND girls who like to run around at recess, or you assume that ALL boys want to run around and ALL girls want to sit quietly and read. Please make up your mind.
I believe that my writing was exceptionally clear on this point. Both genders respond to a variety of pedagogical styles; there may be differentiations in the frequency of preference for particular styles (I wouldn’t be surprised).
but take a wealthy WASP and put him in a school over his head, and no one assumes he got in on racial preferences.
In fact, I specifically noted that legacy admits are subject to the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons. (Comment 84, paragraph 5.)
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Hi, Robert - sorry I misunderstood you, also.
No worries.
I guess I don’t understand why you chose to phrase things the way you did, but I’ll take your word that you don’t believe there is a variation between the average intelligence of socially constructed races.
There are either differences in average intelligence between races, or there are not.
If what we are calling “intelligence” is what is measured on an intelligence test, then there are definitely differences. This is not an arguable point, although that does not stop a fair number of people from arguing it. (Often people with very high scores on intelligence tests, too.)
Do those differences measure real variation in human intellectual potential? I don’t know. I have never noticed any such difference in my own interactions with people of various races, but those interactions seldom involve tests of analytical capability or cognitive speed. I certainly hope not. It does seem clear that things like nutrition, environment, childhood learning opportunities, parental support and the like are far more important in determining any particular child’s intellectual development than any biological constraint.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Robert claimed students do not apply to elite colleges because they can’t afford it. In reality, all the Ivy League schools and other elite schools have a need-blind policy that admits anyone without knowledge of their financial situation. Once admitted, a package is worked out that may include a 20-hour a week job, endowment gifts, grants, loans. The result is anyone can attend the most elite schools because of their greater endowments. Poor students may get high-paying corporate jobs, etc. after graduation to pay off a loan but the point is anyone can attend and graduate from a Ivy League school regardless of their financial situation.
* ensure that the material resources are made available as needed to ensure that sufficient aid money to students is available so that nobody is settling for State solely because they can’t afford Harvard. (Note: to students, not to institutions. The current policy of giving money straight to the schools is fostering an absolutely awful inflationary policy for college education. For complex but uncontroversially existential economic reasons, it just works far better to put the money straight into the student’s hands, even if it’s a voucher rather than cash.) This one is easy: we tax people and give the money to other people. If we do this intelligently, people won’t mind too much, particularly if the money comes from some other part of the education leviathan.
68 out of 118 comments now by white men none of which address the original post that said the “boy crisis” is about poor, Latino and black boys and that it is anti-male because it underestimates boys. There are no straw feminists in the “boy crisis” debate because it is conservatives who push for sex-segregated public schools. They reinforce traditional masculinity that says “boys will be boys.” It is not feminists who push this idea but those who support sex-segregated public schools. In fact, “boy crisis” panics blame
The “boy crisis” panic also claims
and
We mostly have comments from white men that focus on themselves/anti-affirmative action instead of the original post about 1) about poor and minority boys in public schools and 2) the problem of anti-maleness/pro-traditional masculinity in public schools.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
That yours is a commonly-held opinion doesn’t make it somehow factual.
The article on college completion looks at one year’s freshpeople. Upthread it has been pointed out that college-completion rates are increasing for everyone. I don’t think there’s argument here that rates are lower for many minorities and for the poor. This article points out that completion rates are higher at all private institutions than at all public ones, and that students with the highest GPAs and SATs were more likely to complete in 6 years than students with average GPAs and SATs. Nothing here supports the idea that AA is somehow worse than “racial preferences”, or that getting into a school “above” you is destructive.
No, it means that the other possible indicators don’t actually work at indicating.
You’re right. I had forgotten your previous mention of legacies in terms of this.
This comment was written by Kaethe.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
RonF, if you say that the elite schools are elite because they take in the best and brightest,
A school like MIT is elite because not only because of it’s student body, but what it offers that student body. Your premise is incomplete.
what does that mean? Quantifying “best and brightest ” is a bitch, as this lengthy discussion of admissions shows.
It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible. Test scores, grades, class ranks, essays, demonstrated expertise and other factors all taken together work well enough to meet the objectives of the admissions department, which is to select about 1000 students who are the most likely to be able to take maximum advantage of a demanding academic and research-oriented environment, while contributing to the MIT community and the communities that MIT is a part of in a strong, creative and diverse way. As far as happiness or earnings go, that might be an indicator of how things work out after school, but selection for that is not the problem facing college admissions officials for MIT and the rest. How the hell do they measure happiness, anyway?
Will the process miss some kids who would have done well? Sure. Will it let in a few kids who turn out not to make the grade? Not so much. The fact is that there are more kids qualified to be able to take advantage of a place at MIT than there are places at MIT, so there’s plenty more kids they could have admitted that they just don’t have room for.
Is it true just because they say it is? And if that is true, which demonstrably, it isn’t, see the above-cited discussions of legacy admissions and athletic preferences in elite schools.
I can’t answer for preferences for legacies or athletic preferences at other schools; MIT doesn’t have preferences for either. As far as the latter goes, unlike schools like Harvard, etc., the Institute is an NCAA Division III school - and that’s only because there’s no such thing as Division IV. The funny thing is that a very high proportion of the student body there participates in varsity and intermural sports, but they’re there to play, not perform. The Institute doesn’t need to win it’s glories on the playing fields.
but if it were true then wouldn’t preferences of any sort be unnecessary? Because one would expect there to be proportionately the same number of “best and brightest” in every race, in every geographical area, in every economic group.
You would expect that. But, a school like MIT admits kids on the basis of accomplishment as well as on aptitude; and the chance for kids to achieve high academic accomplishment is a function in part of the facilities and faculties their schools have. Various factors cause inequities in these, with the result that that some kids who would have been able to fit in just haven’t gained the academic background that would enable them to take advantage of such a college environment. While it’s too late for most of them to play catch-up, some can, and schools like MIT seek such kids out and admit all they can. The Institute also seeks out kids who can make it at MIT but whose environment doesn’t lend itself to holding or pursuing such dreams.
I’m an example of someone who was admitted with an imbalance in aptitude vs. accomplishment. I had a very high SAT math score, wrote a good essay, and had a strong interview. But I had never had calculus in high school, simply because my high school did not offer it; I was academically disadvantaged relative to my MIT peers. I later asked my old high school teachers about this and was told that there was no one there who was qualified to teach it. I fell 3 months behind and had to cram a semester’s worth of work into the last few weeks or I’d have blown my freshman year. Aptitude wasn’t enough, but fortunately my background in biology and physics was enough to keep me up to speed in those courses so that I could spend the extra time on math and catch up. Some other kid in my position who was weak in biology and physics as well might have flunked out, even though they’d had the aptitude.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
Robert claimed students do not apply to elite colleges because they can’t afford it. In reality, all the Ivy League schools and other elite schools have a need-blind policy that admits anyone without knowledge of their financial situation.
Depends on how you define “afford it”. I know a kid that I begged to apply to MIT but whose family decided not to because of the expense. Yes, if he’d have gotten in he’d have gotten financial aid, but his family’s opinion of what they could afford was a lot different than what MIT thought he could afford. So, he went to the University of Illinois. Which, BTW, has an excellent engineering program and I’m sure he’ll benefit greatly thereby.
There are a lot of people who hear the figures that places like MIT and Harvard charge for tuition and never bother to apply and find out what the final number will be. There are others that refuse to take out any debt to finance their kid’s college career.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 10:13 pm
Kaethe:
The article on college completion looks at one year’s freshpeople. Upthread it has been pointed out that college-completion rates are increasing for everyone. I don’t think there’s argument here that rates are lower for many minorities and for the poor.
Then wtf did I have to research statistics to get you to acknowledge the elementary point? (”Gravity doesn’t work.” “Yes it does.” “Prove it.” “OK, here are the results of the field research from the gravity lab at CalTech.” “Well, nobody ever denied that gravity works!”)
Yes, college completion rates are increasing for everyone. As previously noted, this does not prove or disprove anything. If anything, it indicates a systemic trend that is making college easier for everyone, or a systemic improvement in preparation or counseling or something. It doesn’t bear on a differential performance which persists even as the general rate increases. If 50% of white murderers get the electric chair while 80% of black ones do, and that disparity later shifts to 40% and 70%, that’s not an indication that the racial disparity is fading. It’s an indication that something unrelated is happening while the racial disparity continues operate.
This article points out that completion rates are higher at all private institutions than at all public ones, and that students with the highest GPAs and SATs were more likely to complete in 6 years than students with average GPAs and SATs. Nothing here supports the idea that AA is somehow worse than “racial preferences”, or that getting into a school “above” you is destructive.
Well, “the idea that AA is somehow worse than racial preferences” is pretty much an inversion of what’s been explicated, at great length. So I’m not going to chase that crazy fox.
Low graduation rates, GPAs and class standings are not, as you say, definitive proof that a student-school mismatch is destructive. They merely indicate that there is some problem operating. I believe that a ratchet effect is the simplest and most satisfactory explanation. It is also the explanation that jibes well with the observed data.
For example, at historically black colleges and universities, where racial preferences obviously do not operate, overall performance by black students is just fine. At the highest end elite schools, where the effects of racial preferences are attenuated (there is no hyper-Harvard to ratchet effect the students at that level; most of the students in the top tier would be there anyway), overall performance by racially preferred students is OK. These results are exactly consistent with a ratchet effect, and inconsistent with alternative explanations (most commonly, systemic racism and/or lack of cultural support for minority students, either in the institutions themselves or in the larger community).
No, it means that the other possible indicators don’t actually work at indicating.
This is flatly wrong.
You can have any number of indicators of something, with varying degrees of reliability, correlation, etc. The BEST way to know how fast you are going in a car is usually to look at your speedometer. But you can also count mile markers and do mental arithmetic. You can hold your hand out the window and gauge the wind resistance. You can shoot a laser rangefinder at a distant mountain and take successive measurements. And so on.
I really don’t know where you’re getting this concept that there can’t be multiple functional indicators of something. It isn’t correct.
Donna:
Robert claimed students do not apply to elite colleges because they can’t afford it.
No, I didn’t. Your continued misrepresentations and/or misreadings are becoming exceptionally tedious. Please stop it.
In reality, all the Ivy League schools and other elite schools have a need-blind policy that admits anyone without knowledge of their financial situation…the point is anyone can attend and graduate from a Ivy League school regardless of their financial situation.
This is broadly true but also relatively unimportant. The Ivy League and the elite schools account for a tiny fraction of the nation’s undergraduate educational pool. Of the country’s 2.3 million black college students, how many do you think are getting a full ride from an elite school?
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Amp, I too didn’t fit into the traditionally masculine roles that boys were expected to fit in to. I was uncoordinated - I could neither catch, hit or throw a ball. I was overweight for much of my life (and am now to a degree). I didn’t care about sports or cars and given my choice would sit and read rather than go outside and play. I also was the smartest kid in my class; in math and science I’d be in male-dominated classrooms, but when I went to English class I’d see mostly girls (one class in high school I was one of 4 boys with 20 girls). That gained me far more emnity than approbation among my peers. In elementary grades and junior high I was regularly bullied - one day 2 guys dragged me into the boys room one day and urinated upon me for laughs.
I had two older brothers who decided I needed toughening up. This led to learning how to throw a punch, playing tackle football games sans equipment with the neighborhood boys and other such experiences. I also followed them into Boy Scouts and learned how to light fires, carry a pack for a mile or two even when the straps dug painfully into my shoulders, learn some first aid, cook myself a meal, and swing an axe. And back then, hazing was a standard rite of passage (it’s both formally and effectively banned these days).
I wouldn’t recommend all of the experiences I had be replicated for boys today. Some of the hazing I went though was pretty amazing. But looking back on it, I think that some of that stuff did me a world of good. Getting knocked around playing football and packing a weekend’s worth of camping gear for a couple of miles taught me that physical discomfort and a bit of pain wasn’t a reason to kneel down or go home, and that it was worth it to accomplish a goal. It taught me that even in failure, I could gain some respect from my peers for trying hard and doing my best and not whining. I learned that I could surprise myself and do physical things under adverse conditions that I didn’t realize I could do. And I learned that there was a world outside my house that was worth exploring in person rather than virtually, and that it was worth conserving.
My problem is that I don’t necessarily know what of this would be uniquely a male thing. My daughter is a pretty rough-and-tumble type of person as well; she played hockey and was a softball catcher (she’d generally experience at least one collision with another player or a fixed object per game). I’d say that all kids should have such experiences, and let them gain what they can from it.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
Robert, I said elite schools need alot more people of color and you said one way to achieve this is to
I didn’t make anything up. Furthermore, the main reason people of color aren’t applying is because people of color at these schools say these schools are inhospitable to students of color. Moreover, Robert is glad he didn’t attend “Stanford” but was speaking for people of color because he was unprepared at the elite college he attended. He said he had subpar grades for that school but high scores and I said he can’t speak for people of color because 1) it’s usually the other way around for students of color, good grades and subpar scores 2) he’s not a person of color and didn’t spend the first eighteen years of his life prior to college as a person of color. He probably left the first college because of a lack of a work ethic since he had high scores. He is not in a position to speak for people of color.
I’m not just talking about the Ivy League. Many elite schools have a need-blind policy. This is not a complete list. Your point was blacks and Latinos don’t apply because they can’t afford it. I argue it’s because they know many schools are hostile to minorities.
* Amherst College
This comment was written by Donna Darko.* Brown University
* California Institute of Technology
* Columbia University
* Cornell University
* Dartmouth College
* Duke University
* Georgetown University
* Harvard University
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology
* Middlebury College
* Pomona College
* Princeton University
* Rice University
* Stanford University
* Swarthmore College
* University of Chicago
* University of Pennsylvania
* Wellesley College
* Wesleyan University
* Williams College
* Yale University
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November 25th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Fine. I cede your point. No additional resources need to be provided to minority students who wish to attend college.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
72 out of 125 or 57% of comments by white men talking about themselves and against affirmative action. Only one comment, #124, has addressed the topic of the thread about how 1) public schools shortchange Latino and black boys and 2) how sex-segregated education is anti-male/pro-traditional masculinity/underestimates boys.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 25th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
You’re not ceding the point because extra resources are provided to minority students or any student who want to attend elite colleges.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Donna, do you not get that I do not need to “speak for people of color” because the phenomenon I am describing is racially neutral? It’s a structural problem. It doesn’t have anything to do with which group or groups is inside the structure. If we remove racial preferences from minority groups and extend them to white males from upper-class families, then minority group outcomes and performance will improve and rich white male performance will decline. (Although perhaps not as much, since stereotype threat will only be starting to operate per the Cato theory.)
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Robert, do you not get what most of us are trying to tell you here, that removing racial preferences from minority groups and extending them to white males from upper-class families will improve minority group outcomes and performance and lower rich white male performance? What kind of wing nut theory is this?
Don’t backpedal from your woe-is-me tale in comment #84 about how your individual, white, male failure at an elite college means people of color should not attend elite colleges
The fact that you underperformed probably due to lack of a work ethic informs your argument that people of color should not attend elite colleges. You cannot compare your preparation to that of people of color because it sounds like your preparation before college was different.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I meant
You continue with your weird, wing nut theories in comment #84
Spare me the “tragic irony” and the idea that racial preferences are not necessary to get minorities to attend and that schools only have racial preferences to look good. Diversity is good for society and for business. Spare me the fake concern for people of color. Check out what Robert says here: “Give racial preferences to rich white kids, and rich white kids will start flunking out of college in higher numbers.” Legacy policies have not caused privileged white men to drop out of Ivy League colleges.
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
[...] In the comments of an earlier post, Robert Hayes has been arguing that racial preferences in college admission are bad because they harm minority students through what Robert calls “the ratchet effect.” But “the ratchet effect,” as Robert describes it, is dependent on what social scientists have called the “fit hypothesis” or “the mismatch hypothesis.” If mismatch isn’t true, neither is ratchet. [...]
This comment was written by Affirmative Action Doesn’t Increase Minority Drop-Out Rates. (Also, a Cato Institute report is less than honest - there’s a shocker.) « Creative Destruction.Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Legacy affirmative action for rich whites has not fucked over the career prospects and life paths of wealthy, white students so why do claim this will happen to nonwhite students?
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
[...] In the comments of an earlier post, Robert Hayes has been arguing that racial preferences in college admission are bad because they harm minority students through what Robert calls “the ratchet effect.” But “the ratchet effect,” as Robert describes it, is dependent on what social scientists have called the “fit hypothesis” or “the mismatch hypothesis.” If mismatch isn’t true, neither is ratchet. [...]
This comment was written by Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Affirmative Action Doesn’t Increase Minority Drop-Out Rates. (Also, a Cato Institute report is less than honest - there’s a shocker.).Report this comment to the moderators
November 26th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Legacy affirmative action for rich whites has not fucked over the career prospects and life paths of wealthy, white students so why do claim this will happen to nonwhite students?
You seem to be implying that, given identical academic qualifications, a poor, black student matriculating into an elite college at the same time as a rich white student is just as likely to graduate and go on to a successful career. Do you really believe that?
Also, my impression is that elite schools are typically willing to go to greater lengths, in terms of lowering admissions standards, for underrepresented minorities than they are for legacy applicants. I may be wrong on this point, though.
This comment was written by Brandon Berg.Report this comment to the moderators
November 27th, 2006 at 7:39 am
I decided to try to find out what MIT’s admission policy was on this. According to a speech by then-President Vest a few years ago, their policy is to admit every member of an underrepresented minority who applies who is academically qualified. They also conduct a summer program for matriculating students who feel they need some additional academic preparation and orientation to the MIT environment, and try to get every underrepresented minority into it.
So, what are we talking about when we say “affirmative action”? Does it include a policy such as the above, where underrepresented minorities who don’t meet the same academic standard as everyone else are not accepted, but all those who do are?
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 27th, 2006 at 7:51 am
RonF, that is an affirmative action policy (or at least would be counted as one in the UK). The question I have is is the policy relative in that if we have a distribution of:
non-minority
100
99
98
97
96
95
minority
100
96
95
Where an acceptable entrance score is say 90 then do we take the non-minority 100 / minority 100 as our first picks then fill say the remaining 3 slots with non-minority 99.98.97 or do you take the minority 96,95 then the non-minority 99?
I could understand (though not endorse) an AA policy where equal grades (so in my example above the minority 100 gets preference over the non-minority 100) however can we really endorse a non-meritocracy if the minority is given preference over a non-minorty who was academically better?
This comment was written by Chris.Report this comment to the moderators
November 27th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Hm. Let me go your example one further to add an additional factor.
non-minority
100
99
98
97
96
95
94
93.5
92
minority
100
96
93
92
91
Where an acceptable entrance score is say 90, I can admit 10 students, and the minority proportion of the population as a whole is 30%.
If I understand MIT’s policy correctly, they would accept the top 3 minority students and the top 7 majority students. That would be because once they had admitted the 3 minority students, they would no longer be an underrepresented minority - they would be present in the admitted class at the same proportion they would be present in the population. This would mean that the minority student with a score of 92 would be admitted while a majority student with a score of 93.5 would not be admitted, so there would still be a preference at work.
In practice at MIT, this does not occur; there are not enough qualified minorities applying to enable MIT to admit them to the proportion that they occur in the population. So the actual practice so far is to admit all qualified minorities that apply.
There is a qualification to that; Asian-Americans are a minority in the U.S. population, but they are admitted at a higher proportion than they occur in the population because of the large number of qualified Asian American applicants.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 28th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Would like to put in my own two cents, having gone to MIT myself.
Trouble about Affirmative Action is that there are several flavors of it:
MIT: Several years back MIT noticed that SAT scores correlated pretty well to GPAs, but under-predicted the ability of female students. Hmm. Ok–they started adding a fudge factor during admissions to take account of this. As far as I know, they still do this.
Stanford: (in the 1990s) We’ll take every female student who has graduated from a California high school! Regardless of what their grades are!
Stanford quickly dropped this idea when they discovered a higher percentage of their female students were dropping out because they found classes “too difficult.”
One thing that I liked very much about MIT was the amount of rope they gave one. Once you’re in, they expect you’ll be able to get through. A sizable percentage don’t graduate in four years–some take less time, a lot take more. During my period there (1980s) it was quite popular for people in Computer Science to drop out for a year or so, work at one of the start-up computer companies in the area, make a bunch of money as a software designer, then come back to polish off the degree. For all of the pressure that we were under as students, it was often quite comforting to think that MIT wouldn’t have let us in unless they thought we were up to the level of work required. We WOULD be able to get through. (MIT’s also the only university I know about where the pre-meds helped each other out with homework.)
This comment was written by grumpy realist.Report this comment to the moderators
November 29th, 2006 at 10:39 am
RonF, thanks for your observations in 124. The activities you described are by no means beneficial only to boys– I was also a quiet, studious (female) child who found some growth through physical activities.
As a nature educator of both single-sex and co-ed groups of children, I’ve observed that boys and girls both prefer to learn through hands-on activities or motion. Girls are more hesitant to compete in co-ed groups, especially as they get older and the cultural expectations of girls become more restrictive– I have noticed that teenaged girls will pretend not to know the answer or will defer to boys much more often than younger girls will. During freetime, girls in co-ed groups do choose much more passive activities, but in the absence of boys they will take over the basketball courts and sledding hills with enthusiasm.
Boys (especially in single-sex groups) seem to have a problem following the instructions of a female nature instructor. “I don’t have to listen to a girl” is a pretty pervasive attitude, even at a young age. It’s amazing to me how suddenly snakes and frogs and creeks become worthless to boys if taught by a woman– there’s this idea that anything a woman is interested in is not good for boys. Since boys are told (by the boy-crisis people) that only girls are good at sitting still and reading, all of a sudden, reading becomes useless to them. And I have yet to meet a girl who would rather sit and listen to a lecture on trees than go for a hike and look at trees. But we as a culture place a lot of importance on girls being quiet and polite; we expect girls to sit still and read, so they will. It’s not about ‘hardwiring’, and we do both boys and girls a disservice if we base our expectations of them on false gender essentialism.
This comment was written by AceR.Report this comment to the moderators
November 29th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
MIT: Several years back MIT noticed that SAT scores correlated pretty well to GPAs, but under-predicted the ability of female students. Hmm. Ok–they started adding a fudge factor during admissions to take account of this. As far as I know, they still do this.
My understanding is that there’s not a fudge factor; what was done was to give greater weight to the Verbal SAT score. I’m actually in favor of this on a very straightforward basis. If you want to really change the world with technology, and want an ability to guide/control that change, you need to be able to communicate. You also need to communicate well to be able to work as part of a team.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
November 30th, 2006 at 9:50 am
AceR, I have faced the issue of “I don’t want to listen to a woman” from the boys. In fact, the news a few years ago that we were going to have our first female Assistant Scoutmaster was met with less than unbridled enthusiasm. “If we have her around we won’t be able to do stuff or say things.”
“Like what?” I asked. I told they they shouldn’t be swearing or such anyway, and as far as (I didn’t use the term, but described it) sexist language or deprecatory language about women or girls, 1) I don’t want it either, and 2) they didn’t know enough about women or girls to know WTF they were talking about.
OTOH, I also found that I have had to have a talk with some (not all) of our suburban mother Assistant Scoutmasters. This has been along the lines of “Your shoulder patch says ‘Assistant Scoutmaster’, not ‘Troop Mom’”. For example; a kid comes up to you with a cut on his hand. It’s bleeding. You take a look and it doesn’t appear to be so deep as to require stitches or other professional medical care. What do you do?
“Oh, the poor kid is probably scared and in pain; I’ll clean it out for him and put a bandage on and give him a big hug.”
Wrong. You ask him if he knows what to do. If he says that he should clean it out and put a band-aid on, tell him he’s right and to go do it. If he doesn’t, tell him what to do and where he can get a band-aid and some soap and water. Then let him do it himself. I have had problems with some female ASM’s who want to do all kinds of stuff for the kids, even cleaning up the pots and dishes after dinner. There’s one that it has taken me over a year to break of the habit of following the kids around and doing things for them and from interfering with the kids when they are doing something that is actually reasonably safe but has some hazard associated with it (like using an axe).
Of course, then there’s an issue we have faced as Moslems and Hindus have moved into the area. In Cub Scouts, the youngest kids (Tigers, Wolves and Bears, 1st - 3rd grades) tend to have female-led dens, and the older kids (Webelos I and II, 4th and 5th grades) tend to have male-led dens. I have heard of female Den Leaders who have been told by kids that their Dads have told them that they don’t have to listen to what a woman tells them to do. I can imagine what those kids must be like in school!
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 29th, 2006 at 5:36 am
will actually be a well educated female lawyer to show that he has no idea what he’s doing since his father just handed down the position, as is so classic of “the old boy” network, aka, the way patriarchy has been upheld. >>Further reading: Alas, A blog has a great write up regarding this piece as well.
This comment was written by Handle the Truth.Report this comment to the moderators
February 11th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
This is for poor and poor minority students who may be reading this. At Harvard, families that earn less than $40,000 a year don’t have to contribute a penny to their kids’ education; Yale and Stanford do the same for families making $45,000 or less. Parents of Harvard students with incomes of $40,000 to $60,000 only have to pay $2,250 a year. Application fees are also waived for poor students. Students are expected to work over the summer and during the school year.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1226169,00.html
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
February 11th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
“The shifting financial-aid priorities could result in a kind of virtuous mixing of the college gene pool. High-achieving kids are going to lesser-known schools and public institutions in greater numbers, drawn by the generous offers. They will inevitably bring higher academic standards with them. And lower-income communities are finding that their gifted kids can gain entry to the most expensive schools, perhaps helping pry open the austere gates of Harvard Yard a little wider in the process.”
This comment was written by Donna Darko.Report this comment to the moderators
April 1st, 2007 at 1:05 pm
[...] here’s a footnoted thread about the “boy crisis.” the very definition of whiny can be found on the same thread. several middle-aged, middle-class white men making a topic about lower income and black, Latino and Asian boys all about them. i wonder if you are a middle-class, middle-aged white guy who wants to make the “boy crisis” about yourself. [...]
This comment was written by Feministing.Report this comment to the moderators
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:59 am
[...] and a short review of said article Posted by judyb12 Filed in girls, america, boys, education, feminism [...]
This comment was written by Article - A War Against Boys? « On about.Report this comment to the moderators
August 27th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
[...] Science, Blogosphere — Robert @ 12:14 am A while ago we had an interesting set-to at Alas about the ratchet effect, with me saying it was real and pretty much everyone in the universe [...]
This comment was written by The Ratchet Effect at Work in Law Schools « Creative Destruction.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
One more study finding no “boy crisis” in the classroom, but rather a race and class crisis.
This comment was written by nobody.really.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Shhhh! You’re going to pux Sax and Gurian out of business! How can you suggest that genuinely helping boys in trouble is worth that?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators