Are college grads getting dumber...

[jlb1705]

The value of bachelor's and master's degrees is being diluted bigtime due the fact that it's easier than ever to get a college degree and get into grad school, and the fact that even shitty, menial jobs require a degree now. Each of those factors exacerbates the other.

There is pressure to provide access and raise enrollement... even if that means accepting and pushing through students are not ready at some places. There are so many college grads nowadays, that many places can make that a minimum requirement for open posiitions. My credentials are diluted due to the fact that so many people have the same ones, and even though I consider myself to be fairly intelligent and articulate, there are far too many people with the same credentials as me who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

I started advising back in the fall, and I was amazed at just how many people need some kind of developmental education. Granted, I work at a community college, so that rate is going to be much higher than at an Ohio State or even a Wright State. Still, it was stunning. I even took the placement test myself, just so I better knew where my students stood, and I was even more amazed. The tests were a breeze to me, and seemed almost common sense.

I think science majors complaining about composition and literature requirements is bunk. You may not need to be able to read and write to be an engineer, but you do need to be able to do those things to function in the rest of society. I do think that more math should be required for non-majors though.

 

[buckiprof]

I took Pre-Calc in my Senior Year in H.S. and I got a B overall in that class and I got placed into 075...lol But the good thing is that since I passed 075 I don't have to take another Math course! YAY!

In my experiences, most pre-calc HS courses aren't very good. One would be surprised to see the number of students who take a course like that and then test into a developmental level math course. That is completely unacceptable and a waste of someone's money IMO.

Also, it should be an impossibility to receive a college degree without taking and passing a college level mathematics course and Math 075 is not such a course. In its pristine theoretical form, mathematics teaches logical thinking, problem solving, and solving multi-stepped problems. In other words it can help one to think and that should be important no matter the major. In an applied setting, it can help one understand the mathematics of finance, for example, and that too should be important to folks no matter the major.

The value of bachelor's and master's degrees is being diluted bigtime due the fact that it's easier than ever to get a college degree

The net result of lowering requirements I'm afraid. What if every major required Intuitive Calculus, for example, to earn a degree? I know of an institution where nurses pursuing an RN degree now only need Elementary Algebra and no chemistry! My wife received her BSN from OSU in 1987 and she needed Trigonometry and more than one chemistry course. To me, this is alarming.

There is pressure to provide access and raise enrollement... even if that means accepting and pushing through students are not ready at some places.

The big buzz word amongst college adminstrators is "retention". A couple of years ago I was on a committee and an administrator brought up an idea about a plan to increase "student retention". After he was done, I interjected that if he and other administrators would worry about the other meaning of "student retention", i.e., information that students retain from class to class, that the adminstration's myopic view of retention would take care of itself. Again, I find that in the past few years too many administrators have started to think of college as a business. We need more administrators to be academicians and not middle managers, or bean counters, or act like CEO's. Most institutions have bean counters/managers, and need them also. They shouldn't be overly involved in the academic side.

I think science majors complaining about composition and literature requirements is bunk. You may not need to be able to read and write to be an engineer, but you do need to be able to do those things to function in the rest of society. I do think that more math should be required for non-majors though.

Extremely well said. The ideal of a well rounded education seems to be slipping somewhat since my days of walking the oval.

 

[mcclellanatosu]

In my experiences, most pre-calc HS courses aren't very good. One would be surprised to see the number of students who take a course like that and then test into a developmental level math course. That is completely unacceptable and a waste of someone's money IMO.

Also, it should be an impossibility to receive a college degree without taking and passing a college level mathematics course and Math 075 is not such a course. In its pristine theoretical form, mathematics teaches logical thinking, problem solving, and solving multi-stepped problems. In other words it can help one to think and that should be important no matter the major. In an applied setting, it can help one understand the mathematics of finance, for example, and that too should be important to folks no matter the major.

Excuse me? Are you saying i'm an idiot because I took Pre-Calc in HS and took 075? Maybe some people (like myself) do not test well? I happend to go to one of THE best High Schools in the state of Ohio. (Top 1,000 in the nation) And I HIGHLY doubt that the Pre-Calc course wasn't any good or worth while. However, I do think that all majors should require a semi-decent math course. Say 104?

 

[Golferdow01]

Excuse me? Are you saying i'm an idiot because I took Pre-Calc in HS and took 075? Maybe some people (like myself) do not test well? I happend to go to one of THE best High Schools in the state of Ohio. (Top 1,000 in the nation) And I HIGHLY doubt that the Pre-Calc course wasn't any good or worth while. However, I do think that all majors should require a semi-decent math course. Say 104?

I don't think he's attacking you directly bro, just stating what the norm is. He knows quite a bit about the college education system.

 

[mcclellanatosu]

I don't think he's attacking you directly bro, just stating what the norm is. He knows quite a bit about the college education system.

Okay but he doesnt know where I came from so why make a statement saying that HS math classes are shit?

 

[Golferdow01]

Okay but he doesnt know where I came from so why make a statement saying that HS math classes are shit?

Unfortunately because most are. I come from a fairly privelaged area and anything below calculus was considered "average" at best.

 

[jlb1705]

I've only advised for one quarter, and like I said, it's a community college, but I can count on one hand the number of students I've had that placed into college-level algebra. Part of it is the students themselves, but part of it is the schools and the overall lack of urgency to teach and learn the subject.

 

[DCBuckFan]

What if every major required Intuitive Calculus, for example, to earn a degree?

I have long believed that to get a 4 yr College degree, you should have to take Calculus. When it comes down to it, people are typically just intimidated by the idea of a Math class, especially if that class is called Calc, it isn't really all that difficult.

As buckiprof said so eloquently, it isn't that you have to do Calculus in your everyday job after you graduate, but you DO have to have some logic skills. That is the biggest skill set that Mathematics courses in general help to develop.

Also, in my experiance, it is the one thing that people in general out there completely lack, any solid logical reasoning.

 

[Golferdow01]

I have long believed that to get a 4 yr College degree, you should have to take Calculus. When it comes down to it, people are typically just intimidated by the idea of a Math class, especially if that class is called Calc, it isn't really all that difficult.

As buckiprof said so eloquently, it isn't that you have to do Calculus in your everyday job after you graduate, but you DO have to have some logic skills. That is the biggest skill set that Mathematics courses in general help to develop.

Also, in my experiance, it is the one thing that people in general out there completely lack, any solid logical reasoning.

Hey, if it means people will make more decisions based upon logic than emotion, I'm all for it. I hate getting into debates with people who try and act logical, but once they see themselves trapped in the corner return to emotional statements.

 

[buckiprof]

Excuse me? Are you saying i'm an idiot because I took Pre-Calc in HS and took 075? Maybe some people (like myself) do not test well? I happend to go to one of THE best High Schools in the state of Ohio. (Top 1,000 in the nation) And I HIGHLY doubt that the Pre-Calc course wasn't any good or worth while. However, I do think that all majors should require a semi-decent math course. Say 104?

I don't think anywhere in my response did I state that you were an idiot. I did state that in my experiences many HS course called pre-calc aren't very good. This can even be true at a HS in Ohio that states it is one of the top 1000 in the country. (BTW, I have looked at how some of these Top 1000 HS's perform on mathematics tests as compared to the rest of the world, and the comparisons are disturbing at best. And that also includes a Top 1000 HS here in Ohio!). I have seen many people come from what is regarded to be a top HS, some have even taken a HS calculus course, and place in a developmental math course. Many state that they are bad test takers, some are even apprehensive of math tests in particular, but if one comes from a HS that offers a top notch mathematics curriculum, it should come across in a placement test to some degree.

Okay but he doesnt know where I came from so why make a statement saying that HS math classes are shit?

True enough, I don't know where you came from but there is a difference between me stating that most HS pre-calc course aren't very good and your assertion that I said HS math classes are shit. Most HS pre-calc courses aren't very good since they tend to spend too much time on the algebra topics and not nearly enough time on trigonometry. Students would be much better prepared for calculus if after taking an Algebra II course, they had one semester of analytic geometry followed by a semester of trigonometry. That is true pre-calc curriculum, not what is usually taught in a course called pre-calc. (You don't know my background in this area either, but I know a little something about mathematics. FWIW, I have a couple of degrees in mathematics from OSU, have been a mathematics professor for almost 20 years, have authored a calculus textbook and finite mathematics textbook and am currently authoring a college algebra, trigonometry, and pre-calc textbook series. I have also served on local mathematics curriculum committees, for local school districts, worked with some folks in C-bus pertaining to math curriculum statewide, and worked with the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) about mathematics articulation between colleges and from hs to college.)

 

[Thump]

(You don't know my background in this area either, but I know a little something about mathematics. FWIW, I have a couple of degrees in mathematics from OSU, have been a mathematics professor for almost 20 years, have authored a calculus textbook and finite mathematics textbook and am currently authoring a college algebra, trigonometry, and pre-calc textbook series. I have also served on local mathematics curriculum committees, for local school districts, worked with some folks in C-bus pertaining to math curriculum statewide, and worked with the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) about mathematics articulation between colleges and from hs to college.)

Can we say OWNED?

 

[NewYorkBuck]

My opinion on this is that it starts at the K-8 level. Forever, our universities have been the envy of the world. Anyone who is anyone tries to come to the US for their college work. Unfortunately, you cannot say the same about our little red school houses. Almost every report I see places the US near or at the bottom of developed nations in math and science at the pre-university level. Anyone in college take calc or physics class with a kid who went to HS in Germany? I did, and these kids could sleep through class because they had all of it in high school. Conversely, I know of a grammar school right here in NYC that at the 4th grade level teaches one hour of math a week. Yes - Ill say that again - one hour of math a week. The person I knew who teaches there say the cirriculum is designed with the lowest performing students in mind. IMO - there is only so long that you can do this before it catches up with you. Our students are now showing up so woefully unprepared for college now that more than half the time there can now be used just to do what should have been done in high school.

However you want to cut up the pie after its made, science and technology are the only things that make the pie bigger, and I am not so optimistic on the future of our bakers right now. I hire about six or so college or recent college grads into my group a year. Even though it is a finance position, a premium is placed on quant skills - almost everyone I hire has a science/math/eng degree. The sad part - when I cull through resumes, looking at just the qualifications, I pull out maybe the top 10% of the total to interview. Of that top 10%, almost without exception the kids from China and India outnumber the kids from the US by at least 5 to 1. Makes me a little scared for our future when I think about it.

 

[buckeyegrad]

It is shameful that an institution like Ohio State allows anyone to graduate without completing Math 148 at a minimum (Math 150 would be the better choice). On the other hand, I also think it is shameful that anyone can graduate from a university these days without obtaining a basic, reading comprehension level in a foreign language. As has already been pointed out by others, it is not even so much that people will use these skills in the future, but it is the critical thinking and analytical skills developed by taking such courses.

Unfortunately, these problems even occurred in the Honors program when I used to advise those students at OSU. A fair number of very bright students in the Humanities and even the Social Sciences would do about anything they could to avoid taking Math 150 (miminum Math requirement for a B.A. with Honors). At the same time, I had a fair number of Science students who would try to get out of the 104-level course of the foreign language sequence (a minimum requirement for a B.S in Honors).

Jlb touched on it earlier, but the biggest problem with higher education today is an oversupply of opportunities. I know this runs against the idea most Americans hold for universal access, but the fact is that not everyone needs to be at a Research I institution or even a state comprehensive university like Bowling Green or Ohio U. The desire to increase enrollments in order to obtain greater tuition revenue and state subsidies has contributed to the watering-down of the curriculum at many fine institutions.

 

[MililaniBuckeye]

When schools started allowing calculators in class, therewas no longer motivation for kids to actually learn useful math skills such as multiplication tables. I had some ditzy high school chick working at the counter of a Burger King ask me if five cents was the correct change after I gave her a dollar bill for a 95-cent order (the cash register was apparently on the fritz so she couldn't rely on it to figure it out for her). I just gave her a "You gotta be fucking shitting me" look and said "Un, yeah".

 

[Thump]

When schools started allowing calculators in class, therewas no longer motivation for kids to actually learn useful math skills such as multiplication tables. I had some ditzy high school chick working at the counter of a Burger King ask me if five cents was the correct change after I gave her a dollar bill for a 95-cent order (the cash register was apparently on the fritz so she couldn't rely on it to figure it out for her). I just gave her a "You gotta be fucking shitting me" look and said "Un, yeah".

I couldn't agree more Mili.

I refuse to allow my students to use a calculator.