4 ms·

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not acc

• jimbokun 4mo ago
  Who the hell can go 10s of thousands of dollars in debt to have Socratic discussions without gaining a credential valued by employers at the end of it?
  • beepbooptheory 4mo ago
    Why wouldn't employers value it?
  • delfinom 4mo ago
    A student populace not taught financial literacy and memed they have to go to college to succeed. High schools hiring "advisors" whose entire job is to maximize the college application rates to make the school look good. My high school, quite a few years ago had 10 "advisors" you only met in senior years their entire existence was to milk those college numbers. The one I got assigned to ended up throwing a major fit even including the principal because I refused to let her write a recommendation letter for me. I didn't know her and she knew nothing of me but some bullshit she wanted me to write down to guide her. I told them to fuck the right off. Boomers turned college into an industrial pipeline.
  • jeremyjh 4mo ago
    Why would you pay 10s of thousands of dollars to get a credential everyone knows is meaningless? The first ChatGPT grads are just now entering the workforce. I have a son entering his junior year of high school. Who knows if a degree will be worth even the time investment 5 years from now.
    • kys11 4mo ago
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  • tejtm 4mo ago
    If an employer really valued the credential, they would supply it.
  • pclowes 4mo ago
    That’s my point. It is only so expensive because it is a gate to earning money. The concept that everybody should go to college and the Federal Pell grants and funding to that effect is what causes college to be expensive. So now we pay twice. Once with our tax dollars for a high school system that does not appropriately stratify students. And then again with insane amounts of debt that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy to teach remedial algebra to adults that have no interest in learning it.
• foolfoolz 4mo ago
  we have a school system that rewards graduation and punishes punishment. our public school especially is geared around progressing the lowest common denominator forward at all costs. private schools can run how they want, public schools are paid to do 2 things: 1. get butts in seats 2. have kids move up when the year is over
  • toomuchtodo 4mo ago
    There are no resources for those who don’t progress, as there already aren’t enough teachers for the existing K-12 workload, and existing teachers are overloaded in the aggregate. This is the failure mode of a system exceeding its capacity with no ability to apply back pressure. Slowly failing as gracefully as possible, eventually passing everyone. Nguyen, T. D., Lam, C. B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages. AERA Open, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241276512 https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241276512
  • yourapostasy 4mo ago
    > private schools can run how they want... This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.
  • jkestner 4mo ago
    Something something about metrics ceasing to be a good measure. Texas has draconian measures for districts containing a failing school, even as they redistribute the majority of funding from cities to rural districts. No surprise the schools want to pass by any means.
  • chadgpt3 4mo ago
    There is something about devoting effort to maintaining the form of a thing while ignoring its essence.
• XorNot 4mo ago
  What do you plan to do with the people who don't pass though? Everyone's very excited to have failure rates or whatever and then mute on the real problem: those people don't just go away.
  • Xeoncross 4mo ago
    They are still there either way. They don't suddenly become smarter and/or hard working because we pretend. If anything, it simply increases the pool of people who realize you don't need to try.
  • qball 4mo ago
    We hope the social redistribution that would have to be there to help those that fail, and those employed to teach them, is less expensive than every citizen forced to sacrifice 8 years of prime life time and tens of thousands of dollars. Because that is how we are redistributing from successful people to not-successful ones right now.
  • kys11 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • whimblepop 4mo ago
    You can't make people more knowledgeable by not attempting to measure their knowledge. You can maybe try to improve things for subsequent generations. But issuing a false credential won't solve the problem.
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  • D-Machine 4mo ago
    Ironic because it is the people who push for just passing everyone that are actually doing it to just "make the problem go away", in reality.
  • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > What do you plan to do with the people who don't pass though? Remedial classes. Or, realistically, unskilled labor. Like, what do we do with these kids now? The same thing, except after we’ve saddled them with a meaningless diploma and a pile of debt.
• ifidishshbsba 4mo ago
  It’s often not even about the job but to get visas
  • saimiam 4mo ago
    The comment you were replying to was about school kids, not foreign students in post secondary programs looking for work/immigrant visas. Also, foreign students enrolling in American colleges are (a) here as a result of decades of conscious policy choices (b) provide a not insignificant portion of the operating budget of many institutions (c) would go elsewhere if America wasn’t an option - so you aren’t really gaining much by keeping them out. Source: former F1 visa masters student here
• jimbob45 4mo ago
  Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic. Math teachers had the balls to radically revamp their curriculums with Common Core and now their teachings are no longer formulaic but instead stimulate original thought and creativity. It’s high time for English teachers to do the same.
  • floxy 4mo ago
    Citation needed for American public high schools that have a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum.
    • deleted 4mo ago
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    • raddan 4mo ago
      Obviously my experience is a little dated (graduated high school in 1997), but Shakespeare was a recurring theme throughout my high school English classes. We read The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, and a number of poems, some of which we had to memorize and recite. I didn’t mind the poetry; I still remember bits of the Whitman, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll poems I memorized. In addition, we read The Odyssey (which felt like torture to me), various Dickens novels, Jane Austin (also torture), etc. Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.
    • yc0042 4mo ago
      class of '23 here. Not exactly a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum, but was made to read Romeo & Juliet and Othello as well as various sonnets in high school.
  • lmm 4mo ago
    > Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic. Were Shakespeare's plays "relatable" 370 years after being published and then suddenly became unrelatable in the last 30? I think not. If students' participation in classes about them has changed, it's not because of the plays aging.
• jmspring 4mo ago
  My step daughter graduated this last week (high school). Watching the curriculum over the last 4 years, they had 5-8 validictorian (all a's) and 6-8 salutarians (sp?) (all a's one b). They would have been at the 3.x level in my high school 25 years ago. The rigor in high school is no longer there, community college is adopting to the lesser expectation as well.
  • tasuki 4mo ago
    This has been going on for thousands of years...
• cjbgkagh 4mo ago
  And what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?
  • D-Machine 4mo ago
    Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.
    • cjbgkagh 4mo ago
      Are you willing to risk a lawsuit to stand on your principles? Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
      • D-Machine 4mo ago
        > Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist? Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
        • cjbgkagh 4mo ago
          In this hypothetical you’re a teacher, not world emperor, so you’re limited to pass/fail decisions of a particular class at a particular school. I personally have grave concerns regarding the poor education of the youth and think education should be far more stringent, but unfortunately I don’t get to make those decisions. If I was a teacher I’m not sure I would be willing to fall on that sword. I avoid the issue by not being a teacher.
• pclowes 4mo ago
  Additionally any college grad that: 1. Takes out six figures of loans for a degree in a field with no hope of commensurate income 2. Pays minimum payments below interest 3. Whines on social media that after X years of not even covering the interest payment they now owe more than ever Should: 1. Lose both their college and HS degrees. They clearly dont understand HS math. 2. Their college’s accreditation should be investigated 3. Same with their HS
  • KPGv2 4mo ago
    So your solution for the system failing a person is to punish the person but reward the powerful people engaged in the bad behavior. The ones who brainwashed the kids into thinking that this is what they're supposed to do.
    • pclowes 4mo ago
      No, the people giving degrees that say a person can do basic math when the person can’t do math should not be able to give out degrees anymore. Similarly, the person with the credential that says they can do basic math that cannot do basic math should not have the credential.
    • b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
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    • anubistheta 4mo ago
      People have agency. The system didn't fail a person. That framing completely ignores their actions. Especially for paying so little on their loans and complaining about it. 18 year olds can vote. If we trust them with that, surely they can be responsible for their own choices. Moreover, they said the accreditation of both institutions should be investigated.
• johnobrien1010 4mo ago
  This assertion seems light on sources. What evidence do you have to support your claims?
  • deleted 4mo ago
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• KPGv2 4mo ago
  > 90%+ of all people in undergrad I'm not sure if you realize you're basically saying most people with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean should not be pursuing higher education. Currently 40% of young adults are in higher education in the US. (based on a quick google, percent could be wrong, i also saw 60% pursue it at some point) As a heuristic, let's assume they're the 40% with the highest IQ. If 90% of them shouldn't be there, then you're effectively saying only the highest 4% IQ individuals should be there. Two standard deviations cuts out 95% of people. What a very high standard. And I'm not even getting into the mountains of research that higher education makes workers better at their jobs, ceteris paribus. So you're saying genius-level people don't belong at uni.
  • pclowes 4mo ago
    In short yes. Top 10% is not genius level. You see the outcome of this all the time at the PhD level. Even top 2% often just does not cut it when trying to do novel research. So many PhD’s get stuck in the post-doc adjunct cycle with never a real shot at tenure. That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Again, this is all dedicated on the high school diploma being actually hard and valuable. Associates degree replace undergrads, undergrad replace masters, etc.
    • KPGv2 4mo ago
      > we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars Is it really your assertion that university is a waste of time for the most intelligent decile? Do you think four bucks in late fees at the public library remotely resembles a quality university education? I find people who didn't go to university often say things like this, because they've drunk some kind of far-right kool aid.
  • whimblepop 4mo ago
    https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293%2FS2199-1006.1.SOR.2024.0002.v1 https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293%2FS... The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ. People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates. And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.
• JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > the populace would not accept that What is your evidence for this? It seems like there is growing frustration with the realization that we may have an economically useless cohort about to hit the real world.
  • pclowes 4mo ago
    High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents who are mad that you are ruining their kids chance at an Ivy by giving them a B- in HS algebra (meanwhile the ivies remedial math classes are packed more than ever)
    • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents When I took the California high school exit exam, it was already a joke. Still, the news was filled with people treating every failure as a failure of the test.
  • keeda 4mo ago
    I'd say grade inflation is the clearest evidence. It has been a widespread, long-simmering issue; I've heard teachers bemoan the phenomenon in at least 3 different countries in as many decades, and each of them cited the ire of the public as the underlying reason. I think the growing frustration is real, but it's coming more from employers than the populace in general.
• abaymado 4mo ago
  I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually deserved their badge of honor. But for students whose parents were "fortunate" enough to send them to private school, they became a part of a corrupt system, whose only incentive is to have its students pass the national exams. Most private schools had high graduate rate, due to them bribing testing officials to allow cheating. I was one of those privileged students who went a private school, who passed the national test without even reading a single question. I paid the price for it once I started college in the US. But unlike my origin, I had a chance to take a break from college and recalibrate my brain in a sense and find joy in learning. If failing were normalized and did not have so much social stigma or financial implications (to an extent), we would produce more educated people instead of once just chasing credentials.
  • godelski 4mo ago
    I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more). Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge. I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy. Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't
• GuB-42 4mo ago
  The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be? You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't really want more of these. So, more apprenticeship? That's actually a really good solution, but an entire system needs to change as it shifts the burden of training to employers rather than schools. Whatever the solution is, it would have an impact on every aspect of society, maybe positive, maybe negative, my guess is on an overall negative as even if lowest common denominator education is not ideal, it is still better than no education at all for the masses. But it is debatable, and it is often debated. Also there is a correlation between countries tertiary education rate and GDP and life expectancy. It does not imply causation, but it supports the idea that it may be a good thing.
  • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > You need to give these people something to do Yes. But not as a first-order priority. Fixing the incentives in the schooling system can take priority over figuring out what to do with every single person passing through it. (Also, a market where a third of students fail to graduate high school will find use for that labor.)
  • pclowes 4mo ago
    They are already doing it. They just have a useless degree and if they went onto college, another worthless degree and likely a bunch of debt in order to do it. Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.
  • jkubicek 4mo ago
    > The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be? Doing the exact same thing they’re doing now, just without wasting 4 years in college and being $100k in debt
• insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  > They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. The problem is that because you can no longer get a non-minimum wage job without a college degree, universities are now basically just a place to get a piece of paper so you can get a job, any job. They're no longer "halls of higher learning". A bachelor's degree is the new high school degree. If you could earn a living without a college degree, like you used to be able to, those going to uni would be those who want to educate themselves.
• VoodooJuJu 4mo ago
  [dead]
• thrance 4mo ago
  Notice that how hard a diploma is to get is completely irrelevant to literacy rates.
• LocalH 4mo ago
  The US has a really bad problem with parents thinking they should have deity-level say over every single aspect of how their kids are raised. This is very ironic, since the US also has a really bad problem with other parents thinking they can tell people how to raise their kids (witness all the "free-range" children who have innocently gotten their parents in trouble because some other parent saw them alone and called the police).
• chadgpt3 4mo ago
  It should be less stigmatized to fail, study, try again, and pass. This way more people would have the credential because they have the knowledge as more people would have the knowledge. The credential would mean something, even though most people would have it.