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I'd love to see some data behind this. It's too easy to view this incorrectly from the point of view of an educator.

• slmkbh 10y ago
  To be fair, this is also a concern here in Denmark. Quite a few University professors have complained that students do not have adequate skills in mathematics, as the bar has been lowered over a number of years in the high school system. My opinion is, the wish for a higher percentage of university graduates in a generation has lead to an inappropriate lowering of standards. (even if I am part of it....)
  • ktamiola 10y ago
    Natural sciences are a disaster nowadays. I also see this trend whilst talking to people interested working for my startup.
• ktamiola 10y ago
  If you start searching, you will find the data. There is a decent body of work on the attention span issues and cognitive abilities. The most of it in the context of "social media" revolution. It's not my area of expertise, though. My personal experience at Cambridge and Groningen University was always very good with students. Yet, these are peculiar places.
• ouid 10y ago
  Among its statistics, the article presents that "60 percent of lecturers have caught some student cheating". This is so unusable and misleading that I'm tempted to call the whole article bogus.
  • bencollier49 10y ago
    I think the statistic to look for (where?) would be the percentage of students caught cheating who are not subsequently expelled. My guess is that this figure has risen, as a result of the profit motive.
• closeparen 10y ago
  In the US, about 40% of students who enter college do not graduate [0]. This has many surprising implications. - Graduating from college, any college, does mean something because many of the people who try can't hack it. - Big state schools seem to be "of the people" while elite private schools are, well, elite. But they are not so different. Elite private schools have low admission rates but also near-zero dropout rates. Big public schools have high admission rates but also dropout rates in the 40-60% range. They just apply their filters at different parts of the funnel. - The way to a more educated population is probably not to expand college access. Already, far more people access college than can complete it. More interesting questions are about how we best serve the people at risk of dropping out. The answer might be to make state schools more selective, not less, so that we aren't wasting people's time (and money!) with programs they'll never complete. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
  • emondi 10y ago
    You can still learn a lot even if you don't graduate.
    • bryanlarsen 10y ago
      Sure, but the possession of a real university degree pretty much guarantees you can at least read, write & reason. Most Americans without a University degree can read, write & reason, of course, often better than a University grad, but the University degree proves you can do it at least minimally. It used to be that a grade 8 certificate would provide that guarantee, then it used to be that a grade 12 certificate would do it too. There are far cheaper ways of proving somebody can read, write & reason but for some reason employers seem to be stuck on that University diploma. I guess it's easy for them.
      • Melchizedek 10y ago
        At the company where I work there is a written test of language/logic/math that applicants for jobs have to take. This has had the effect that almost nobody at this company is stupid or incompetent. They are also easy to work with - I would guess partly because social ability is correlated to intelligence. I suspect this test is the single biggest reason for the success of the company.