10 ms·

Who Gets to Graduate?

116 points by jervisfm 12y ago

donjuanica 12y ago
TL;DR
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
thaumasiotes 12y ago
further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
- Tyr42 12y ago
  Well, in the article, it does say that after the mind-set intervention was applied to all the student (minus the control group), the gap between the at risk group and the affluent group cut in half, as the affluent group's drop out rate was not really affected by it. And again, as they say, it was only 45 minutes, and it didn't "do" a lot. It did however, change how the students interpreted bad events in the future, and reduced the chance of the student feeling that, say, because they failed a test, they don't belong in college at all.
- nl 12y ago
  As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements: house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perform better than students deprived of these benefits. And before anyone gets hung up on the "scholarship" part: I know plenty of students who had parents pay for at least some of their college, but knew they had to perform or their parents would stop paying. That expectation of performance is the same.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements Well, yes. So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance. Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?
    - rlanday 12y ago
      It might be the case that the techniques, etc. being taught to failing students were already known to the not-failing ones, so in that case, there would be diminishing returns to having the students who were already doing better do the same things. It is an interesting question though: should we be more concerned with having everyone reach some uniform level of performance, or is it worth investing more resources in the “best and brightest” students, even though they’re already ahead of everyone else? I think it’s important for public schools at the K–12 level to provide resources for above-average students, which shouldn’t be that difficult except for political questions like how to motivate schools to focus on this, and how to justify spending resources on students who are already going to pass the standardized tests.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        Again, I'm not suggesting we teach normal students to do things they already do. That would be stupid. I'm saying, what if we invested similar amounts of higher-level support? You can hold people's hands at all levels of achievement.
        Tyr42 12y ago
        What kind of things do you have in mind? Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.
- nandemo 12y ago
  Did you read TFA? It's not talking about "dramatically underqualified" students. > If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    The article is talking about supporting students who are admitted to a flagship school in their affirmative-action program despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school. It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile. It lists the human-interest protagonist's appallingly low standardized test scores. What more do you want here? According to http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-of-Texas-at-Austin.html http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-o... , the 25th percentile student at UT Austin (entering in 2011, I think) scored 540 verbal and 580 math on the SAT (annoyingly, this doesn't mean that the 25th percentile student scored 1120 overall, but it's the closest thing I could find). The girl in the article scored the ACT equivalent of 90 points lower. But she's not dramatically underqualified?
    - logicallee 12y ago
      It's an endemic problem - I heard that even at Ivy league schools nearly a quarter of the students are now below the 25th percentile.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        We like to think the Ivies have a narrower range, though. This girl was admitted under UT's explicit policy of admitting unqualified students as long as they come from awful schools. That sort of thing can cause quite a large gap between, say, the 25th percentile student and the modal student. update: for reference: UT Austin 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 590 - 710 Cal Tech 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 770 - 800 How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  That site looks like some really dubious ~~white supremacist~~ "race realist" propaganda page. Some headlines from the homepage: > Crime and the Hispanic Effect > Diversity and Excellence: Are They Compatible? > The Color of Death Row > Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect. Edit, also: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classical.guitar/2008-06/msg00072.html http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classi... "I had never before heard of La Griffe du Lion. His article was so full of egregiously bad methodology and other mistakes that I at first assumed it was a satire of racist pseudoscience, the sort of thing that might be written for the Annals of Improbable Research or (if you're Alan Sokal) Social Text."
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    and you think this makes the description of an intensive support program for low-performing students inaccurate because...?
    - ForHackernews 12y ago
      Garbage in, garbage out. I don't trust that site's analysis, and I don't trust them to accurately report the underlying data without cherry-picking or selecting dubious studies. Given your comment history, you seem like somebody with an ideological axe to grind on the subject of racial and gender diversity, and I don't believe you selected this article from such an obscure source solely for its topicality.
  - 205guy 12y ago
    Finally someone calling out thaumasiotes for his dubious anti-affirmative action screeds. And what a surprise to find he links to racist websites. Not.
pnt12 12y ago
I didn't read the whole article, but from the introduction, it seemed she failed the test because she wasn't used to studying hard in high school. Richer students do have more resources but I can't figure why money was a relevant factor in this case.
- jmz92 12y ago
  The point isn't that she didn't learn to study. If you had read just a little bit farther, you would have seen the real reason: at the first minor setback she met, she began to question whether she really belonged at a prestigious four-year school. That's a pretty understandable reaction given the culture shock she experienced in going to UT. Rich people with educated parents get to feel like they belong at colleges; poor and working class people don't.
- Tyr42 12y ago
  The larger difference is what happens after a test is failed and a student is feeling down. It seems that the more affluent group has more "identity formation" in that they know that they belong at college, whereas the more at risk groups (like students with parents that aren't college educated) sometimes panic, and feel like they don't belong at college, after a mistake of similar size. And that feeling is what causes them to drop out, more than X number of failed tests.
- jotux 12y ago
  I heard a good article on NPR a while back (that I can't find now) that talked about the difference between rich and poor college students. A big factor that helped students from affluent homes is the fact that their college-graduate parents were familiar with college campus services and how to navigate them. So when their children failed tests and called home upset they would tell them to go to a tutoring center, or encourage them to go to office hours and ask for help. Students from poor homes, with parents that never went to college, didn't understand the resources available to them and were more likely to drop out because of that. If anyone can find a link to the article, it would be appreciated.
- ceras 12y ago
  I'm sorry, but it's not very useful to the community to comment when you haven't read the article. It was written precisely to address your skepticism. I recommend reading it if you're curious about the issue.
tlb 12y ago
This is interesting because it shows a specific mechanism by which smart kids of non-college-educated parents drop out. She failed a test in her first month in college, and her mother told her maybe she wasn't meant to be there. I vaguely remember failing a test early in college too, but it never would have occurred to my (intelligentsia-class) parents that I wasn't meant to be educated. I can only imagine how discouraging that feels.
- Tyr42 12y ago
  I wonder what the data says for people with "Tiger moms", even if they are first generation college students. Is that level of encouragement helpful, in comparison?
- reubenmorais 12y ago
  Her mom's doubt certainly makes things worse, but I think the mechanism in motion in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet. Having college educated parents helps with the support part, but it doesn't prevent you from collapsing in the first place. [0] http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Texas as a whole (she scored 22 vs a state average of 21).
    - judk 12y ago
      Define "smart". The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers. If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.
ykumar6 12y ago
Uh oh.. "But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard."
- 205guy 12y ago
  I was also wondering if it was responsible of those involved to be talking to the press about their work, even before they said this. They run the risk of counteracting their effects if the students think it is a gimmick. Also, students not selected for extra help could turn against them, as so many have against affirmative action in general.
jmz92 12y ago
I'm curious: how would the achievement gap change if all or most post-secondary education was delivered online instead of at physical colleges/universities?
- nl 12y ago
  Given the mechanism which seems to cause people to drop out (basically, lack of encouragement and/or sense of belonging) you can make arguments both ways. The completion rate for online courses is very low anyway, so it is likely this difference might be immaterial in the noise of that overall low rate.
- zhemao 12y ago
  I don't think that would change much. This isn't so much about how the kids are being taught but rather about whether or not the working-class kids feel like they belong. Also, online classes are arguably worse for kids who are already doing poorly, since they get less opportunity to ask questions in class or get help from the professor and TAs.
- jacalata 12y ago
  I know someone who teaches at a community college and she said that student groups who normally do poorly in regular classes do even worse in online courses. Random paper here seems to agree with that: http://www.ashe.ws/images/Gross%20and%20Kleinman%20-%20Need%20for%20Speed.pdf http://www.ashe.ws/images/Gross%20and%20Kleinman%20-%20Need%...
incision 12y ago
For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article: 'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.' --- 'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.' Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.
- symfoniq 12y ago
  My own experience supports this claim. While I didn't grow up poor, my middle-class parents separated the week I started my freshman year of college. What money there was went to lawyers instead of college tuition. Realizing I was on my own, I took two jobs and tried to make passing grades (mostly succeeding), but after a year I was forced to face financial reality. Already in a lot of debt, I dropped out and never went back. So when it comes to "who gets to graduate," I have little doubt that financial and emotional support are more important than academic ability.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  IQ is correlated to wealth and IQ is hereditary, so it follows that children from wealthy parents would, on average, have higher IQ than their classmates.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    Wealth is also, to a degree, hereditary...
  - Agathos 12y ago
    Can't be bothered to read the article, indeed. When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
marcell 12y ago
For an in-depth description of the qualitative disadvantages in education, I recommend reading "Live on the Boundary": http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationally-Underprepared/dp/0143035460/ http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...
neil1 12y ago
It's strange that this article just hit the front page of HN, when it was written 20 days ago.
com2kid 12y ago
A lot of junior colleges offer more personal instructional programs and are geared more towards helping out first time students. The more interpersonal relationship between professors and students are community colleges seems like an overall better way to transition students from high school to university. Not to mention they are far more efficient to run! Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social stigma of attending a community college? I am proud that I went to a CC with professors that cared about their students, class sizes in the 20s, and office hours that extended throughout the day. I had brilliant professors across multiple subjects, the common thread running throughout my entire community college experience was that each and every professor who worked there was there because they loved to teach and spread their joy of their field to students. The other obvious issue is poor study skills taught in HS. I tell students in HS that if they get one thing out of HS, which is otherwise a large waste of time, it should be to learn how to study.
- RegEx 12y ago
  One thing I didn't realize until it was too late was that attending community college first forfeits an extremely large amount of potential scholarship money. Transfer scholarships pale in comparison to freshman 4-year scholarships.
  - judk 12y ago
    That means you should apply for scholarships first yes, then go to CC if the financials don't come through.
ericclemmons 12y ago
What's interesting is that I had a very similar experience as a white male (first to go to college out of my siblings/family), and got a 0.4 the first semester. Things seemed easy in high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing, until I realized that University is serious business academically. With friends failing out right and left, I forced myself to attend paid tutoring sessions (worth it) and meet others who had study groups. In the end, it worked out after years of making up for that one mistaken semester, but I had to buckle down on my own because of the fear of telling my parents how bad I performed...
- psbp 12y ago
  Universities should weigh the first semester less and cap the number of hours taken. I know plenty of people who fucked up their first semester due to culture shock/feelings of isolation.
  - gte910h 12y ago
    MIT has pass fail for the first term. http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/first_term_freshman_year http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/first_term_freshman_yea...
  - rahimnathwani 12y ago
    At Oxford the first year exams (prelims or mods) don't count towards your final degree grade, but you can be kicked out for failing them.
roymurdock 12y ago
Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start. Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students. This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.
- codingdave 12y ago
  Wow, did you really just say that state schools are easy, while private school are complex, and then use the phrase "private school caliber students" to punctuate that judgment? I went to a private college. I am not better than my friends who went to state schools.
  - ewoodrich 12y ago
    My charitable interpretation is that the OP is suggesting that large state schools might choose questions from broad, comprehensive body of material, to determine general aptitude. A liberal arts college might select more narrow or field-specific questions that would improve the resolution of the test for specific subjects.
  - ccernaf 12y ago
    It's not even that any person is better than another... Classes at elite public schools like Berkeley, UCLA, UMich, etc. are more demanding than at any but a few private colleges.
cperciva 12y ago
The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree. I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. Poor kids of well-educated parents were far more likely to graduate than rich kids of uneducated parents. Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. All past US studies I've seen have shown the same thing, or at least that parental educational attainment is a better predictor of a persons educational attainment than any other factor, including parental income. > Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility. Or: a lot of the education necessary to success in formal education happens outside of its bounds in less-formal interactions, including, especially, those in the home.
  - watwut 12y ago
    It is also about opinions on college utility. Do parents think college is a waste of time? If parents think it is waste of time, you are more likely to think the same and drop out.
millermp12 12y ago
a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business) b) still smells like Lysenko-ism
- gwern 12y ago
  > a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business) Nope. Did you notice the part of the article where they declared victory and extended the program to all students? > A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018. How nice of them. Besides helping out the student body, this also spares them the risk of having to falsify a cherished idea.
kosei 12y ago
Not to divert from the main point of the article, but this is frightening: More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary. It is astonishing that 2/5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without having generated the means to repay that debt (increased wages through a college degree).
- Balgair 12y ago
  Mind that '4 year college' includes a lot of places that are outside of what you may be thinking of. U. of Phoenix is an example that is very predatory in their loans. Also, many bible and other religious colleges may be included and there are a lot more of those that you'd think. The reasons for dropping out are also complicated: Having a baby, family health problems, personal health issues, mental health, debt from other sources, plain not wanting to continue anymore, drinking or smoking in the dorms, getting engaged (at BYU they say 'ring by spring or your money back') , etc. As with any population, there are a lot of circumstances. Still, I agree with you, the debt incurred here is unsustainable, especially as employers see a degree as a basic test for employment more so.
- prostoalex 12y ago
  If you compensate schools for enrolling as many students as possible and don't penalize them for enrolling (and subsequently failing) unqualified candidates, schools will enroll as many students as possible and subsequently fail unqualified candidates after squeezing their LTV (lifetime customer value). "According to USA Today, the University of Phoenix's Detroit campus has a graduation rate of only 10%, but a student loan default rate of 26.4%.[38] A 2010 report found that the University of Phoenix's online graduation rate was only 5 percent." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
- maxerickson 12y ago
  They aren't necessarily getting saddled with huge debts. I think taking one semester counts as starting (so many of the 4 year college students will have a few thousand dollars of debt, the community college less; I'm basing some of that point on lower level public colleges in my area that charge less than $5000 a semester for tuition, of course many will still pay more than that).
glifchits 12y ago
The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”
- orbifold 12y ago
  This is a phenomena also encountered in European universities. I know for a fact that it occurs in Physics and Math, since our professors were in the habit of showing us performance statistics.They even tend to adjust the grading accordingly. That is you get a B approximately at the first peak and fail if you are significantly behind the second peak. I don't think it nescessarily has to do with income / prior education.
- glifchits 12y ago
  I guess I should have added context. I thought it was funny that it sounded like the author thought that "bimodal distribution" was coined by the chemistry prof.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nshepperd 12y ago
> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating. I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges select students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).
- gwern 12y ago
  There's also the signaling theory of higher education: the point of selective colleges is to show that you could get into them; the actual classes don't matter, so they might as well let everyone graduate and with honors (eg Harvard).
mballantyne 12y ago
An academic paper summarizing studies on the effect of attitude interventions like those discussed in the OP: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUCATIONAL-RESEARCH-2011-Yeager-267-301.pdf https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUC... Positive feelings of belonging and capability seem to be a surprisingly powerful form of race and class based privilege.
- 205guy 12y ago
  It's not just "like" the OP, that IS the academic paper by the psychology professor in the article about the work mentioned in the article.
frozenport 12y ago
Speaks to the failure of affirmative action. She should not have gotten into this school, but instead went to an easier one where she would have passed the exam. Imagine how bad the second pick students are?
- ihnorton 12y ago
  From the article: > It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating. Selective colleges have the resources to give focused attention to people who can (demonstrably) do the work, but lack the necessary habits and structural support.
  - frozenport 12y ago
    Yes, but they were clearly wrong...
- harmegido 12y ago
  What article are you reading?
- 205guy 12y ago
  I thought it actually showed how to fix affirmative action. If you just admit the disadvantaged students, a higher percentage of them will sink. But if you help them with motivation, study habits, and positive outlook (which many lack due to their disadvantaged background), then they can succeed at the same rate, or nearly.
digita88 12y ago
It's interesting because my younger brother and I fared very differently. He had a very low score after high school (I think it was the second lowest score one could get) and never graduated college (despite being accepted for an online degree which he then dropped out). I had a high score in high school, graduated from college (and picked up awards along the way), got accepted in two masters (one of which I dropped out to pursue another masters). We were two years apart and in fact my family gained more income by the time I started college. However I sympathise with this article because not only did I moved cities and am a minority but also because I too failed some subjects in my first year. All you need is perseverance and support.

116 points by jervisfm 12y ago

donjuanica 12y ago

TL;DR

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

thaumasiotes 12y ago

further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?

Tyr42 12y ago
Well, in the article, it does say that after the mind-set intervention was applied to all the student (minus the control group), the gap between the at risk group and the affluent group cut in half, as the affluent group's drop out rate was not really affected by it. And again, as they say, it was only 45 minutes, and it didn't "do" a lot. It did however, change how the students interpreted bad events in the future, and reduced the chance of the student feeling that, say, because they failed a test, they don't belong in college at all.
nl 12y ago
As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements: house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perform better than students deprived of these benefits. And before anyone gets hung up on the "scholarship" part: I know plenty of students who had parents pay for at least some of their college, but knew they had to perform or their parents would stop paying. That expectation of performance is the same.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements Well, yes. So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance. Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?
  - rlanday 12y ago
    It might be the case that the techniques, etc. being taught to failing students were already known to the not-failing ones, so in that case, there would be diminishing returns to having the students who were already doing better do the same things. It is an interesting question though: should we be more concerned with having everyone reach some uniform level of performance, or is it worth investing more resources in the “best and brightest” students, even though they’re already ahead of everyone else? I think it’s important for public schools at the K–12 level to provide resources for above-average students, which shouldn’t be that difficult except for political questions like how to motivate schools to focus on this, and how to justify spending resources on students who are already going to pass the standardized tests.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Again, I'm not suggesting we teach normal students to do things they already do. That would be stupid. I'm saying, what if we invested similar amounts of higher-level support? You can hold people's hands at all levels of achievement.
      - Tyr42 12y ago
        What kind of things do you have in mind? Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.
nandemo 12y ago
Did you read TFA? It's not talking about "dramatically underqualified" students. > If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  The article is talking about supporting students who are admitted to a flagship school in their affirmative-action program despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school. It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile. It lists the human-interest protagonist's appallingly low standardized test scores. What more do you want here? According to http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-of-Texas-at-Austin.html http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-o... , the 25th percentile student at UT Austin (entering in 2011, I think) scored 540 verbal and 580 math on the SAT (annoyingly, this doesn't mean that the 25th percentile student scored 1120 overall, but it's the closest thing I could find). The girl in the article scored the ACT equivalent of 90 points lower. But she's not dramatically underqualified?
  - logicallee 12y ago
    It's an endemic problem - I heard that even at Ivy league schools nearly a quarter of the students are now below the 25th percentile.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      We like to think the Ivies have a narrower range, though. This girl was admitted under UT's explicit policy of admitting unqualified students as long as they come from awful schools. That sort of thing can cause quite a large gap between, say, the 25th percentile student and the modal student. update: for reference: UT Austin 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 590 - 710 Cal Tech 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 770 - 800 How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
ForHackernews 12y ago
That site looks like some really dubious ~~white supremacist~~ "race realist" propaganda page. Some headlines from the homepage: > Crime and the Hispanic Effect > Diversity and Excellence: Are They Compatible? > The Color of Death Row > Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect. Edit, also: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classical.guitar/2008-06/msg00072.html http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classi... "I had never before heard of La Griffe du Lion. His article was so full of egregiously bad methodology and other mistakes that I at first assumed it was a satire of racist pseudoscience, the sort of thing that might be written for the Annals of Improbable Research or (if you're Alan Sokal) Social Text."
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  and you think this makes the description of an intensive support program for low-performing students inaccurate because...?
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    Garbage in, garbage out. I don't trust that site's analysis, and I don't trust them to accurately report the underlying data without cherry-picking or selecting dubious studies. Given your comment history, you seem like somebody with an ideological axe to grind on the subject of racial and gender diversity, and I don't believe you selected this article from such an obscure source solely for its topicality.
- 205guy 12y ago
  Finally someone calling out thaumasiotes for his dubious anti-affirmative action screeds. And what a surprise to find he links to racist websites. Not.

pnt12 12y ago

I didn't read the whole article, but from the introduction, it seemed she failed the test because she wasn't used to studying hard in high school. Richer students do have more resources but I can't figure why money was a relevant factor in this case.

jmz92 12y ago
The point isn't that she didn't learn to study. If you had read just a little bit farther, you would have seen the real reason: at the first minor setback she met, she began to question whether she really belonged at a prestigious four-year school. That's a pretty understandable reaction given the culture shock she experienced in going to UT. Rich people with educated parents get to feel like they belong at colleges; poor and working class people don't.
Tyr42 12y ago
The larger difference is what happens after a test is failed and a student is feeling down. It seems that the more affluent group has more "identity formation" in that they know that they belong at college, whereas the more at risk groups (like students with parents that aren't college educated) sometimes panic, and feel like they don't belong at college, after a mistake of similar size. And that feeling is what causes them to drop out, more than X number of failed tests.
jotux 12y ago
I heard a good article on NPR a while back (that I can't find now) that talked about the difference between rich and poor college students. A big factor that helped students from affluent homes is the fact that their college-graduate parents were familiar with college campus services and how to navigate them. So when their children failed tests and called home upset they would tell them to go to a tutoring center, or encourage them to go to office hours and ask for help. Students from poor homes, with parents that never went to college, didn't understand the resources available to them and were more likely to drop out because of that. If anyone can find a link to the article, it would be appreciated.
ceras 12y ago
I'm sorry, but it's not very useful to the community to comment when you haven't read the article. It was written precisely to address your skepticism. I recommend reading it if you're curious about the issue.

tlb 12y ago

This is interesting because it shows a specific mechanism by which smart kids of non-college-educated parents drop out. She failed a test in her first month in college, and her mother told her maybe she wasn't meant to be there. I vaguely remember failing a test early in college too, but it never would have occurred to my (intelligentsia-class) parents that I wasn't meant to be educated. I can only imagine how discouraging that feels.

Tyr42 12y ago
I wonder what the data says for people with "Tiger moms", even if they are first generation college students. Is that level of encouragement helpful, in comparison?
reubenmorais 12y ago
Her mom's doubt certainly makes things worse, but I think the mechanism in motion in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet. Having college educated parents helps with the support part, but it doesn't prevent you from collapsing in the first place. [0] http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Texas as a whole (she scored 22 vs a state average of 21).
  - judk 12y ago
    Define "smart". The ACT is taken by college aspiring high schoolers. If 22 is top 10% of her whole school, she had some sort of personal cleverness to overcome her near-completely unintellectual community.

ykumar6 12y ago

Uh oh.. "But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard."

205guy 12y ago
I was also wondering if it was responsible of those involved to be talking to the press about their work, even before they said this. They run the risk of counteracting their effects if the students think it is a gimmick. Also, students not selected for extra help could turn against them, as so many have against affirmative action in general.

jmz92 12y ago

I'm curious: how would the achievement gap change if all or most post-secondary education was delivered online instead of at physical colleges/universities?

nl 12y ago
Given the mechanism which seems to cause people to drop out (basically, lack of encouragement and/or sense of belonging) you can make arguments both ways. The completion rate for online courses is very low anyway, so it is likely this difference might be immaterial in the noise of that overall low rate.
zhemao 12y ago
I don't think that would change much. This isn't so much about how the kids are being taught but rather about whether or not the working-class kids feel like they belong. Also, online classes are arguably worse for kids who are already doing poorly, since they get less opportunity to ask questions in class or get help from the professor and TAs.
jacalata 12y ago
I know someone who teaches at a community college and she said that student groups who normally do poorly in regular classes do even worse in online courses. Random paper here seems to agree with that: http://www.ashe.ws/images/Gross%20and%20Kleinman%20-%20Need%20for%20Speed.pdf http://www.ashe.ws/images/Gross%20and%20Kleinman%20-%20Need%...

incision 12y ago

For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article: 'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.' --- 'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.' Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.

symfoniq 12y ago
My own experience supports this claim. While I didn't grow up poor, my middle-class parents separated the week I started my freshman year of college. What money there was went to lawyers instead of college tuition. Realizing I was on my own, I took two jobs and tried to make passing grades (mostly succeeding), but after a year I was forced to face financial reality. Already in a lot of debt, I dropped out and never went back. So when it comes to "who gets to graduate," I have little doubt that financial and emotional support are more important than academic ability.
3pt14159 12y ago
IQ is correlated to wealth and IQ is hereditary, so it follows that children from wealthy parents would, on average, have higher IQ than their classmates.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Wealth is also, to a degree, hereditary...
- Agathos 12y ago
  Can't be bothered to read the article, indeed. When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.

marcell 12y ago

For an in-depth description of the qualitative disadvantages in education, I recommend reading "Live on the Boundary": http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationally-Underprepared/dp/0143035460/ http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...

neil1 12y ago

It's strange that this article just hit the front page of HN, when it was written 20 days ago.

com2kid 12y ago

A lot of junior colleges offer more personal instructional programs and are geared more towards helping out first time students. The more interpersonal relationship between professors and students are community colleges seems like an overall better way to transition students from high school to university. Not to mention they are far more efficient to run! Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social stigma of attending a community college? I am proud that I went to a CC with professors that cared about their students, class sizes in the 20s, and office hours that extended throughout the day. I had brilliant professors across multiple subjects, the common thread running throughout my entire community college experience was that each and every professor who worked there was there because they loved to teach and spread their joy of their field to students. The other obvious issue is poor study skills taught in HS. I tell students in HS that if they get one thing out of HS, which is otherwise a large waste of time, it should be to learn how to study.

RegEx 12y ago
One thing I didn't realize until it was too late was that attending community college first forfeits an extremely large amount of potential scholarship money. Transfer scholarships pale in comparison to freshman 4-year scholarships.
- judk 12y ago
  That means you should apply for scholarships first yes, then go to CC if the financials don't come through.

ericclemmons 12y ago

What's interesting is that I had a very similar experience as a white male (first to go to college out of my siblings/family), and got a 0.4 the first semester. Things seemed easy in high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing, until I realized that University is serious business academically. With friends failing out right and left, I forced myself to attend paid tutoring sessions (worth it) and meet others who had study groups. In the end, it worked out after years of making up for that one mistaken semester, but I had to buckle down on my own because of the fear of telling my parents how bad I performed...

psbp 12y ago
Universities should weigh the first semester less and cap the number of hours taken. I know plenty of people who fucked up their first semester due to culture shock/feelings of isolation.
- gte910h 12y ago
  MIT has pass fail for the first term. http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/first_term_freshman_year http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/first_term_freshman_yea...
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  At Oxford the first year exams (prelims or mods) don't count towards your final degree grade, but you can be kicked out for failing them.

roymurdock 12y ago

Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start. Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students. This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.

codingdave 12y ago
Wow, did you really just say that state schools are easy, while private school are complex, and then use the phrase "private school caliber students" to punctuate that judgment? I went to a private college. I am not better than my friends who went to state schools.
- ewoodrich 12y ago
  My charitable interpretation is that the OP is suggesting that large state schools might choose questions from broad, comprehensive body of material, to determine general aptitude. A liberal arts college might select more narrow or field-specific questions that would improve the resolution of the test for specific subjects.
- ccernaf 12y ago
  It's not even that any person is better than another... Classes at elite public schools like Berkeley, UCLA, UMich, etc. are more demanding than at any but a few private colleges.

cperciva 12y ago

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree. I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. Poor kids of well-educated parents were far more likely to graduate than rich kids of uneducated parents. Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. All past US studies I've seen have shown the same thing, or at least that parental educational attainment is a better predictor of a persons educational attainment than any other factor, including parental income. > Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility. Or: a lot of the education necessary to success in formal education happens outside of its bounds in less-formal interactions, including, especially, those in the home.
- watwut 12y ago
  It is also about opinions on college utility. Do parents think college is a waste of time? If parents think it is waste of time, you are more likely to think the same and drop out.

millermp12 12y ago

a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business) b) still smells like Lysenko-ism

gwern 12y ago
> a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business) Nope. Did you notice the part of the article where they declared victory and extended the program to all students? > A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018. How nice of them. Besides helping out the student body, this also spares them the risk of having to falsify a cherished idea.

kosei 12y ago

Not to divert from the main point of the article, but this is frightening: More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary. It is astonishing that 2/5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without having generated the means to repay that debt (increased wages through a college degree).

Balgair 12y ago
Mind that '4 year college' includes a lot of places that are outside of what you may be thinking of. U. of Phoenix is an example that is very predatory in their loans. Also, many bible and other religious colleges may be included and there are a lot more of those that you'd think. The reasons for dropping out are also complicated: Having a baby, family health problems, personal health issues, mental health, debt from other sources, plain not wanting to continue anymore, drinking or smoking in the dorms, getting engaged (at BYU they say 'ring by spring or your money back') , etc. As with any population, there are a lot of circumstances. Still, I agree with you, the debt incurred here is unsustainable, especially as employers see a degree as a basic test for employment more so.
prostoalex 12y ago
If you compensate schools for enrolling as many students as possible and don't penalize them for enrolling (and subsequently failing) unqualified candidates, schools will enroll as many students as possible and subsequently fail unqualified candidates after squeezing their LTV (lifetime customer value). "According to USA Today, the University of Phoenix's Detroit campus has a graduation rate of only 10%, but a student loan default rate of 26.4%.[38] A 2010 report found that the University of Phoenix's online graduation rate was only 5 percent." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
maxerickson 12y ago
They aren't necessarily getting saddled with huge debts. I think taking one semester counts as starting (so many of the 4 year college students will have a few thousand dollars of debt, the community college less; I'm basing some of that point on lower level public colleges in my area that charge less than $5000 a semester for tuition, of course many will still pay more than that).

glifchits 12y ago

The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”

orbifold 12y ago
This is a phenomena also encountered in European universities. I know for a fact that it occurs in Physics and Math, since our professors were in the habit of showing us performance statistics.They even tend to adjust the grading accordingly. That is you get a B approximately at the first peak and fail if you are significantly behind the second peak. I don't think it nescessarily has to do with income / prior education.
glifchits 12y ago
I guess I should have added context. I thought it was funny that it sounded like the author thought that "bimodal distribution" was coined by the chemistry prof.

deleted 12y ago

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nshepperd 12y ago

> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating. I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges select students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).

gwern 12y ago
There's also the signaling theory of higher education: the point of selective colleges is to show that you could get into them; the actual classes don't matter, so they might as well let everyone graduate and with honors (eg Harvard).

mballantyne 12y ago

An academic paper summarizing studies on the effect of attitude interventions like those discussed in the OP: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUCATIONAL-RESEARCH-2011-Yeager-267-301.pdf https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUC... Positive feelings of belonging and capability seem to be a surprisingly powerful form of race and class based privilege.

205guy 12y ago
It's not just "like" the OP, that IS the academic paper by the psychology professor in the article about the work mentioned in the article.

frozenport 12y ago

Speaks to the failure of affirmative action. She should not have gotten into this school, but instead went to an easier one where she would have passed the exam. Imagine how bad the second pick students are?

ihnorton 12y ago
From the article: > It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating. Selective colleges have the resources to give focused attention to people who can (demonstrably) do the work, but lack the necessary habits and structural support.
- frozenport 12y ago
  Yes, but they were clearly wrong...
harmegido 12y ago
What article are you reading?
205guy 12y ago
I thought it actually showed how to fix affirmative action. If you just admit the disadvantaged students, a higher percentage of them will sink. But if you help them with motivation, study habits, and positive outlook (which many lack due to their disadvantaged background), then they can succeed at the same rate, or nearly.

digita88 12y ago

It's interesting because my younger brother and I fared very differently. He had a very low score after high school (I think it was the second lowest score one could get) and never graduated college (despite being accepted for an online degree which he then dropped out). I had a high score in high school, graduated from college (and picked up awards along the way), got accepted in two masters (one of which I dropped out to pursue another masters). We were two years apart and in fact my family gained more income by the time I started college. However I sympathise with this article because not only did I moved cities and am a minority but also because I too failed some subjects in my first year. All you need is perseverance and support.