Secondly, you seem to imply that no improvement in the education level has happened because of the normalization of high-school education. I disagree with this also. I have no numbers to back this up, but by looking at the world around us, at all the inventions and the added complexity and our increasing ability to handle complex systems, I think we have become smarter.
Thirdly, maybe social mobility was hijacked by some rhetoric or became a symbol for this or that group. But at its core, social mobility means allowing people to rise to their potential and not stifling them. How can we be "sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility" when social mobility is supposed to be _more_ meritocratic, not less?
For instance the difference between 3.5 years without graduating and 4 years + graduation is immense, whereas in a non-signaling model, they should have very similar outcomes.
Education, in the resume / HR sense is absolutely a signal.
Education, in maintaining and excelling in your profession is knowledge.
It's lamentable that degrees are used as filters, but I wouldn't trust someone to do an electrical engineering job who didn't have a related degree. There's simply too much to learn. (Yes, exceptions do exist, but they're not common)
I'd argue the more pointed questions to colleges should be: if you're not equipping your graduates with the latter knowledge, then what are they buying? And why should they continue to pay you?
Standards have never been higher. Students face pressure from college admissions and teachers face pressure from national standards bodies. Policies that have enriched standardized testing companies.
The real issue: Labor power has never been lower. Wages have been stagnant for the past two decades. You need a college degree now because safe middle class lifestyles that were previously available to graduates of high school are now limited to those with certain bachelors degrees.
Whether this is due to political collusion with capital, increased automation, globalized labor or a combination of the three is up for debate. The middle class you're imagining was fueled by an economic engine tooling up to rebuild Europe and a political climate that taxed the rich at 80-90%.
The exact same type of jobs often have different requirements year-to-year. Recruiters start adding or removing requiments based on how easy it is to find people for a role. It just acts as a filter but is often unrelated to the actual difficulty of the role.
Recruiters don't want to have to judge people entirely on merit as it is hard. They pre-filter the pool to focus their search and make it easier to manage and vary the constraints based on number of applicants.
This means people perfectly capable of doing a job get excluded for a superficial reason other than ability or competence and it overly effects people from a poorer background.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
[0] https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/5873/00STU...
And the GDP of Venezuela as measured in bolívar is the highest it's ever been!
"More comparisons on new SAT scores versus critical reading and math scores on the old SAT:
A new 1200 corresponds to an old 1130. A new 1300 corresponds to an old 1230. A new 1400 corresponds to an old 1340. A new 1500 corresponds to an old 1460. But a new 1600 is just as perfect as an old 1600."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/05/1...
Underestimate the caliber of the rising population at your own peril. The failing generation can only cry ageism for so long before their jobs are eaten.
The argument against the downfall of society stands pretty well on it's own without it though, mostly because there's no evidence the tests are getting easier (regardless of recent score changes a 1600 is still a 1600) and even less evidence the test takes are becoming less accomplished.
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.
I think it's a bold conclusion to leap from one genetic marker doesn't seem as strongly correlated to education levels among Icelanders to "cognitive genomics is on the decline".
Better to use hyperlinks; order of posts on HN is not immutable.
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My older son needed a certain ACT score to get into the school he wanted. He wasn’t anywhere near the score. After 10 one on one tutorial sessions at $100 a pop with former college professors. He got in. He didn’t all the sudden get smarter. He had access to resources.
Another anecdote, I had the highest SAT score in my school and I believe at least the second highest in my city out of 5000 graduating students (not a large city). How much of that do you think was due to me being one of the smartest or hardest working students in my city (usually ranked near the bottom in income in the US) and how much was it due to my mom not only being a high school math teacher but she also had done SAT workshops for years?
I didn’t have to go to a “SAT Tutorial” class with 30 other students where an overworked teacher volunteered to come in the morning for an hour before school started. I had all the help at home I needed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
We had this. It was called high school. But then standards were lowered so it was no longer a good filter for intelligence and conscientiousness. Standards were lowered to increase "social mobility." This did not work. Now college performs the same function. But the average IQ of college graduates will continue to decline as the percent of the population that graduates approaches 100, and so masters degrees are becoming increasingly common.
Will this, too, increase social mobility?
Social mobility in a meritocratic society is hard given the heritability of valuable mental traits. If we keep sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility, we will end up burning the first 30 years of or lives getting Phds in mopping floors.