Attention Economy


Sunday, September 20, 2020

College Education – The Quantity versus Quality Trade-Off

Make School Hard Again: Grade inflation needs to stop.
https://reason.com/2019/05/26/make-school-hard-again/
 
Do the Math…or Not
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/06/do-the-mathor-not/

The Quantity versus Quality Debate –
Fredrik DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, notes:
“To say that everyone should go to college presumes that everyone has the aptitude and desire to go to college. We have every reason to suspect that isn’t true. Already today, the national college-graduation rate tends to hover around 60 percent. And that’s among students who start college; the many millions who don’t attempt college are surely among those least likely to succeed in higher education. What would happen to the graduation rate if millions of people who previously did not attempt college were to flood our campuses? I have no doubt that some of them would flourish, but on balance we can certainly expect more dropouts, more remediation costs, more debt, and more stress on colleges that already struggle to graduate an adequate percentage of enrollees …
It also strikes me that if the inevitable outcome of significantly greater college participation rates is lower standards, then our national response to hordes of new college students would be to make college significantly easier to get through.”. 

Real World/Economic Consequences -

 Philosophical Perspective - 
The Best Reason to Go to College by Pico Iyer
It’s the same as it ever was: To learn that the world is more than the issues that divide us.

Societal Consequences of Lowering Educational Standards:
Tom Nichols: "The Death of Expertise"

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