> It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school."

You're kidding right? That most certainly was the case... many years ago.

No. You are completely missing the point here. Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. What this will do is allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need. Remedial courses put an undue financial and time burden on students who would be better served with a bit of motivation and support to get through actual 101 level courses.

US students ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math, and 28th in science. Kids in Hungary and the Slovak Republic outranked us.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students...

The sad truth is that the university in the USA are just degree mills looking to make the most money possible. They have no problem steadily lowering their standards to match the steady decline in the US educational system as long as the federally-backed student-loans keep rolling in.

The bar was extremely low, especially at the business school. I was perplexed after reading people's discussion board posts or edit group work. Many students had serious trouble writing coherently or using proper grammar. Math classes were even more ridiculous.

Around sophomore year I gave up on school work in favor of software development and still managed to graduate with a 3.2 GPA.

I'm looking for a new job in part because I disagree with their decision to seriously ramp up marketing and recruitment. IMO if a university can't stand on their faculty / programs / research they aren't really worth attending.

I understand the spirit of your example, but mentioning esp. Hungary is quite out of place. I work in an international context and have many colleagues from all over Europe - and the Hungarians absolutely kick major ass (Apologies to the HN community for the choice of language).

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

The US citizenry allows this, overall. Partly there is the manipulation of reasonable desires for "freedom" and "local control," and part of it comes from the social attitudes toward math and science that lead to STEM being disproportionately dominated by children of immigrants in the US.

Reading through this article reminds me of decades ago approaches to making sure graduation rates for high school went up. they simply changed the requirements and load, put the burden on faculty, and labeled anyone who disagreed as a bigot/racist/etc. So we ended up with students who do not know how to learn and their understanding of basic math, science, and literature, suffered.

Just what type of degree program will these young people actually obtain? Without the base Eskills how can they manage the more difficult subjects to come?

[1] http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/21/jeb...

I recently visited a school with one of these in every classroom. Every student has a laptop. Every classroom has an unused commercial "curriculum" product in the corner.

And given how much administrators make, and presumably embezzle, I'm not even sure these are bad investments, in a relative sense.

The overwhelming majority of kids (including me) received poor educations. I learned this in college when I was shocked by the difficulty of the courses. The majority of the kids passed high school because the standards were lowered.

I think lowering the standards in college is failing to target the source of the problem. I believe the further you get from hard skills (e.g., math or cs) the more relevant your soft skills become (e.g., cultural fit)[0]. The fact of the matter is that poor people have a distinct culture and it involves many elements that are not normative. I don't know if it is objectively more difficult to assimilate culturally or learn hard skills. On the other hand, I found it so difficult to assimilate to my PhD program in a social science that I didn't finish. I found programming to be much easier, albeit still a difficult mid-career change, than assimilating culturally. If it is the case that acquiring hard skills offers better opportunities for the poor to rise, then that is exactly what teachers and parents should be telling their kids. That is exactly what those with "sympathy for the poor" should be funding.

[0]Brendan Eich & the Googler who wrote about diversity are counter examples. I can (but I won't) argue the case they have better chances financially due to their hard skills compared to a person in a occupation lacking said skills.

Yes lower-ed degree mills are a huge issue, and need regualating, but that hardly applies to CalState, which is a top tier public school: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/cal-state-la-1140

Appropriately so, when the issue is their preparedness for further education.

> Yes lower-ed degree mills are a huge issue, and need regualating, but that hardly applies to CalState, which is a top tier public school.

The concern is that it appears to be taking a step in the degree-mill direction. Reading the article in full does not assuage that concern:

“Our timeline for implementation is aggressive,” Minor [Cal State’s senior strategist for academic success and inclusive excellence] said, but “we've got more than enough evidence to suggest that our current treatment of students, with the use of developmental education courses, doesn't serve them very well. ... And we have worked with and talked to our faculty... who are ready to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work that we need to do to serve our students better.” [all elisions were made in the Times article, so I am trusting the journalist has not misrepresented Mr. Minor.]

The justification seems to be that this will work because a) other things do not, and b) we want it to work. Anyone who understands how bureaucracies respond to "aggressive" mandates that specify outcomes for unproven methods probably has misgivings.

In fact, I feel like I've seen a study showing that the "new math" teaching methodologies that get parents so mad nowadays end up with kids being better at math...

To each their own I suppose.

This is the same approach that sports/martial art/artisans use (deliberate practice, etc). The concepts are tools, and being able to use those tools intuitively and instinctively is key to advancing to the next level.

Since we're generalizing, I think that most people that complain about complaining parents haven't taken the time to listen to what the parents are actually complaining about.

It would be interesting if teachers could provide cliff's notes of the lessons so parents can help out. Would help the kids too!

Or even better, teachers could have kids prepare explanations for the techniques. Might take a while but I bet the children will remember the techniques way better afterwards.

But I'm happy everything works out so easily for you. I could only hope that one day I'll be as smart as you seem to be.

If you hate something on political grounds, you're not going to be amenable to finding out what it actually is, for example.

It's pure politics.

Hell if anything, universities are making up for the massive shortcoming of public schooling by offering courses to people who would not have otherwise received anything resembling an education.

As for the degree mill statement, who cares? Since when do degrees matter anyway? If destroying the integrity of the accreditation system results in more people getting an education, then so be it. Accreditation is almost never anything more than a racket anyway.

> allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need

If the placement tests are done well, they would indicate that which remedial classes the students may need. If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them.

While putting them into 101 classes may help them, it slows down the rest of the class -- the students who are up-to-speed on the skills required for the class get less attention spent on them because more focus must be placed on the students who didn't pass placement.

The tests are fine and we know it. The students are bad and so are their parents, who were also bad students.

Source: I was a bad student who had to change a lot in life. Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Teachers can only do so much yet burden almost all of the blame.

Funny how that works.

"Why won't you learn?!" "It doesn't matter to me!" is not a recipe for success.

I appreciate what you said. Made me want to jump out of my chair and clap. But then I would have been escorted to the loony bin, so...

On the other hand, I personally didn't go straight from high school to college, so I was given a particular placement exam, and when I passed it I was put in college algebra (instead of being allowed to take the next harder placement exam). It was clear to me after about a week that I remembered more math than the school thought I had. Of course, I should have tested out of the class and used the free time to take something that would have been more useful to me.

I wish the school had been less rigid about which math class they would allow me to take. But the obvious outcome with this policy change will be that students will have to decide which class to take, and some will get it wrong. Will they be allowed to fail? Will that help double the graduation rate? Will more classes simply include remedial material? If so, is that an improvement?

First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses?

Second, at least my school generally gave you enough rope to hang yourself if you wanted to. You want to take arguably the hardest undergraduate math class in the US? Well go ahead...

No. An anecdote:

In my tenth grade science class, they had a quiz where you have to memorize the name, atomic number, and atomic size of the first 20 elements of the periodic table. You then fill in the blanks on a table with each of these fields in the columns, and some elements in the rows. I passed this test.

In the first week of my eleventh grade chemistry class, we were presented with the same quiz. I knew I had previously passed this test, so I didn't study for it -- and got an F (~40%, IIRC). My Chemistry teacher -- concerned about my poor performance on this "placement pre-test", asked if I was sure I wanted to take his course. I replied yes, and went on to be the second or third highest mark in the class (an A).

(Of course, then I went into Software Engineering in University, and the lack of labs in our Chemistry courses completely ruined my passion for the subject.)

Trouble here is that human memory is an associative memory - being given one piece of information helps you recall other, related piece. So when the correct answer is written down just few lines below the question you'll probably be able to identify it, even if your overall recall of the material is very bad. This strongly encourages learn-pass-forget style of learning.

To better test student's knowledge you need harder tasks: practical exam, asking to actually apply your knowledge. Or write an essay, which at the very least forces you to put your knowledge in some logical structure. Or the oral exam, where it's evident whether you can have intelligent discussion on the topic or not.

The only advantage of quizzes is that they are quick to do, quick to check, and give the teacher illusion of fairness (because there cannot be any debate whether or not answer is correct and complete).

Very much depends.

"Name members of X" is an easy question (unless there is a great amount of material that could be covered).

"Mark the following statements as correct or incorrect. Correct classification adds, wrong classification deducts points." can be a quite difficult type of checkbox-test.

I did not-so-well on the math subject GRE myself. It was the first time I'd done multiple choice higher(ish) math questions and I just didn't train to triple-integrate fast enough or answer questions about the properties of ring homomorphisms. Write a proof? Sure! I did fine actually getting the PhD. I also placed into 'remedial' math at Caltech according to their placement test; fortunately they let me switch out and up in the first week as it really wasn't appropriate.

This is where you are wrong. Classes such as remedial English or basic mathematics did not used to count for college credit, they now do. Therefore students can graduate with a lower level of performance than was previously possible.

There area number of alternative remediation models that have been used in other institutions without the problems experienced by the current CSU remedial ed program that campuses may be guided by. This is all expressly laid out in the article.

"Freshmen who would usually be directed to developmental English or math will instead enroll in the same general education classes as their peers, but they might receive additional tutoring or take the course at a slower pace, stretched over multiple semesters. A summer program for incoming freshmen who need extra preparation will be redesigned to count for credit." http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...

Your quote does not really support that description; it suggests that they will be directed into either non-remedial for-credit courses with additional tutoring or other support, or courses with the same content (and credit) as non-remedial courses but a stretched timeframe. The former is clearly not credit for remediation (the only “remediation” is outside of the for-credit classwork), the latter arguably could be described that way but the content is not remedial, only the manner of presentation.

> since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level.

It was suspended through 2018, and there is a recommendation to repeal it, but the exit exam wasn't based on current curriculum standards and the other assessments (including several in eleventh grade) that are aligned with those standards aren't being eliminated. So I don't think it has any bearing on how hard it is to identify students falling behind.

HS graduation exams are useful feature of most successful school systems. That so many people were passing those but still requiring remedial instruction indicates that there was something lacking. However, if graduation rate is the metric you are optimizing for, there is no need to pull those in.

The real problem is that high schools aren't preparing some students for college. That's really where things need to change.

I agree with your final point. I also believe if the current mandate is to ensure students are prepared for upper course load, then at least the entry to admission perhaps need to be increased? Or at least offer a free one-semester remdial class. If someone is not ready to do a "2x+3=6" then high school education failed to do its job and allowing the student going into a college knowing every college requires some math class to graduate (pre-calc, or as calculus+), only do more harm.

Fixing high schools for real would require us to get engaged with politics -- that's at least three more years of hard work ahead of us.

A fascinating side effect of open courseware and online lecture videos is the elimination of that peculiar historical belief. For example, per video evidence, the kids in Professor Strang's linear algebra classes are definitely not observably smarter than the kids I met in my linear algebra class. There is a small measurable quantitative difference, but in practice there is no observable qualitative difference. The much maligned concept of human biological differences observationally do not extend to mere ivy-attendance.

I passed University physics by watching MIT OpenCourseWare lectures and those kids learned in a week what took us three...

Investors and employers will give more to a Harvard grad than to an equally accomplished state-school grad.

This is a downward spiral. Universities get less picky, A inflation, more money for universities but devaluing degrees. Companies catch on and drop the requirement for degrees.

"Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment. It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken."

http://www.ey.com/uk/en/newsroom/news-releases/15-08-03---ey...

First, many college remedial courses don't achieve their aims. They have high DFW rates (D means you can't progress, as C or better is usually the prerequisite, F is fail, W is withdraw). Their graduates often don't do that well in the next class anyway.

Second, there is a lot of evidence that providing good teaching and targeted intervention in the 101 class (rather than the remedial class) increases achievement and advancement. One really interesting example is the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars program. It is not remedial, but it does take students who are no more prepared for calculus than any other students and ask them to spend more time on the harder material in class, and these students do better. Many WES students are from demographics with lower math achievement in regular classes.

While remedial classes have face value, they don't actually have a track record of success! Why persist with something that does not achieve what it aims for?

This is how highschool was for me. I dropped out of a highschool with a 98% graduation rate. In that situation, no one cared if people were learning or even about what's best for the society or economy. For the school it's about building a system that gives them the desired numbers. Second anecdotal: Education has been giving girls better grades. There is a college in California that is famous for their animal science and veterinary programs. Girls don't want to work with big animals. So the school simply does not have enough people interested in big animals. They tried lowering the GPA requirement just so they could let enough boys into the program. This caused their school ranking to fall, and they immediately reversed the decision.

Schools are playing politics. Favoring girls in education has led to problems across the board as people just assume girls will want to do the same jobs at the same rate.

All anecdotal for sure. Definitely nothing conclusive. Just thought I'd add my 2 cents.