Let's ignore, for this post, community colleges, which are designed to be places to give people an opportunity to catch up. 20% remediation rate for four year schools is still shockingly high. What I don't understand is the disconnect between admissions and placement. Presumably, everyone of these 20% who need remediation were given the thumbs up by the admissions team to be ready to succeed at their college. Then, just a couple of months later, the placement teams in various departments learn the real truth. It seems like there is no feedback from the placement results back to the admissions people. Is there are correlation, say, on the Math SAT to the math placement test? If so, maybe the admissions team needs to change the methods they use. High school students are very attuned to what the admissions people are looking for, and certainly change their behavior when admissions signals that they are looking for more extracurriculars, or "leadership", or what not. If admissions says "passing our Math placement test is a requirement for admissions", every high school student would be on that task. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. It seems like this is what is happening in many colleges.

I have a friend with a fourth grader in public school. In this class there is one profoundly disturbed kid who routinely picks up his desk and throws it, swears at the teacher, and threatens everyone, including the teacher, with physical violence. I think it just takes one "fully included" kid to completely destroy any hope of learning in a classroom. The other students have been taught the skills of ducking and covering, which isn't really the sort of skills I'm focused on for mine.

Congratulations! For as different as the process is in the UK vs. for those of us in the US, it seems like both come down to a nervous waiting game at the end. So glad to hear that your wait is over with happy news.

I don't doubt this is true, but Gladwell's thesis is that these failing students would have all passed their classes, graduated, and become doctors, if only they went to an easier school. I think, even at the easier schools, you still need to show up and do the work.

I think the big advantage that the middle and upper class college students have is that often their families and peer groups have passed on to them valuable life lessons about how to succeed in college. For example, in high school, you can often do well just by being smart, but as Regentrude shows above, in college, you almost certainly need to put in the work. In the article, the featured girl said that she rarely did math homework in high school, but still got A's and B's. I'm sure that somewhere in her preparations for college, someone told her the incredibly valuable advice that for every hour of class time, she should be studying 2 to 3 hours, but I bet that wasn't from a trusted source, so it didn't sink in, or she didn't "get it". However, things seemed to turn around when she found a student nursing club: I'm a big proponent of students finding and joining these kinds of academic clubs. I think it is so valuable to have peers, some of whom are ahead of you in your program, that you can network with, trust, and learn the ropes. More than once, on these boards, someone has said "I'm halfway through my degree in X, but I'm worried about job prospects". But they never talk about what their peers in their degree program are doing, especially those a year to two ahead. I wonder if older college students are stigmatized not to talk to traditionally aged students about these things? Or are our board friends mostly taking online classes, where there isn't an opportunity to join and form these kinds of clubs. I worry that with more and more education going online that these kinds of clubs will become more rare. When mine go to college, this is certainly something I will be talking with them about.

Gladwell's thesis (incorrect, I believe) is that the more selective a college, the less likely a student who starts out as a stem major will graduate with a stem degree, though they very well may graduate with a non-stem degree. However, his data was all from small private LACs in the 1980s, that all had very high graduation rates.

Frankly, of all the factors in my decision, the textbook would not be one of them. They are both great texts. I would pick based on quality of the teachers, time and amount of direct instruction, rigor of teaching, prep for NLE/AP, cost, style of instruction, fit with my child, etc. etc. etc.

It depends. Very few professional schools (none?) offer full support for their students, and I don't think ever have: law, medicine, architecture, etc. I think this is also true for the increasing number of terminal masters programs, which are not research focused, and mainly serve vocational purposes. Graduate school in the sciences generally provide full support (tuition + some stipend) in exchange for a TA-ship or RA-ship for the top students they have admitted. This also happens in the humanities, but I think the bar is generally higher to get full support, because there are fewer positions available. In both the sciences and humanities, students can be admitted without support (that is, the student has to pay full tuition), and that's where a lot of the problems with graduate school debt happen, I believe. These schools are happy to take the students' money, but don't have a great deal of confidence in their ability to succeed in their field. I've been told many times that, for programs that do support some of their graduate students, if you get admitted without support, that you shouldn't accept. I don't think everyone has got that memo, though.

I'm struck by the plight of our very own boardie on this thread, who seems to be part of this cohort of MA students: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/519907-so-depressed-about-work-opportunities-jawm/ Perhaps more importantly than plunging into graduate schools without thinking of the costs, is plunging ahead without much certainty of what the value of the degree will be at graduation.

I've never heard of a statewide ranking for high school seniors. What is it based on? How would homeschooled kids be measured?

Also, can you network with other students in your program, and see what they are doing?

And if you can't remember it, does that mean your IQ must be low... :laugh:

There's an assumption running through this thread that there is a strong correlation between the price of college/university and its prestige/value I don't think this is generally true. For example, Harvard, no matter what the "sticker price" is, has such a large endowment, that they can be very generous with support. I bet, for those middle class kids that can get in, it may be the least expensive four-year school they could attend, even though it is widely held to be among the best in the US. There was an article in NYT a couple of years ago, which still haunts me, about a woman who graduated from Wartburg college with $100k in student loan debt, and could only find employment at Starbucks. I had never heard of this tiny LAC, so I looked it up, and tuition was something like $35k a year, but the average SAT CR score was 480 (!) I would hope that most big state schools are much more competitive on scores, and much less expensive on price. And if SwellMomma is still listening, I'm curious what, if any tuition differences there are for her "School A" (known to be good in her field) vs. "School B".

Just Agreed WIth You. If you don't mind us asking, you say that you are two years into your MA -- are you almost done, or do you have a ways to go? I would hope that if you are close, you can hang on and finish. Would you consider teaching online at the high school level? My feeling is that there are more opportunities at that age group.

I think you need to decide if you really need color or just black and white. I've been very happy with my Brother black and white laser. It's a little frustrating sometimes not having color, but never having ink jam or dry up, and not having to pay for super expensive ink is a huge plus.

According to the CNN story, the family tried hard to push the story via social media:

Alice was paid, though, right? Please tell me Alice was paid.

I see almost the opposite here, there's an overwhelming trust and faith in technology to easily cure any hard problem. Our local public school is trying to get enough money together to give all elementary school kids ipads, because clearly that will solve all the educational ills in the schools. Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?

"inter illis" is certainly wrong, as 'illis' is dative/ablative, and inter takes the accusative. So assuming "them" is a mixed-gender group of people, i might go with the genitive for the second them, so more at "among them, but not theirs": "inter illos, non illorum" But, as I said, my Latin isn't at the tattoo stage, but I 100% certainly would never risk a permanent tattoo to the whimsy of translation software.

My Latin isn't tattoo-worthy, but I'd point out that "illas" is feminine, so "inter illas" is, lacking any other context, "among the girls", which may or may not be what he means... And "ex" is more like "out of"

The Torch: The podcast of The Great Courses (not too advertisey) In Our Time from BBC4 Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips

Other things that bug me about this talk: He implies that a STEM degree is the only one worth getting from Harvard, and that if you graduate with a non-STEM degree from Harvard, you are doomed to a life of minimum wage jobs. While I accept, all other things being equal, that it is probably easier to get a job for a stem major than a humanities major, if your dream is to study history for a living, and you are admitted into Harvard, a Harvard degree in History is probably a darn good place to start. Also, all of these SAT based statistics in his talk only cover nine small private LACs. When I think about good schools for STEM people, especially for the Engineers, the technical schools really come to mind first: places like MIT, CalTech, Harvey Mudd, etc. These places don't offer much in the way of non-stem majors, so you can't switch majors from stem to non-stem mid-stream. These schools don't have 50% transfer rates, so how does his theory hold up here? Many of the big state Universities also have excellent engineering programs -- what about them, does the theory hold there? For the statistics about the Economics PhD students, there's a huge hole in the argument: He claims that the top Economics student at any "bad" university has better publishing output than the second best student at the best University. Be that as it may, the second best student at the best University is still going to have a much better shot at the elusive tenure-track faculty positions, because brand recognition is a significant part of hiring. I don't think this arguments are going to sway hiring decisions at major institutions, unfair though that may be. Given how few tenure-track faculty positions are open now, I suspect there are vanishingly few offered to PhD graduates from "not top-30 schools". Finally, while I agree that "fit" between student and college is very important, I think it is a huge mistake to think that you can line up all colleges on one linear line and rate them from best to worst, and judge fit to the student based on this one dimension alone. There are all kinds of dimensions of fit, from size to location to faith to extra-curriculars offered, etc. etc. etc. It is vital to find a good fit, but there are all kinds of things to consider beyond just the school's average Math SAT score.

I doubt 30 percent of the stem majors at Harvard in 1985 had 581 or below. I can't find any data, but wikipedia says: "The score ranges of the middle 50% of admitted applicants to Princeton University in 1985 were 660 to 750 (math)". So, the bottom 25% of Princeton's 1985 admissions class would be substantially better than Harvard, and we're not even talking about the stem cohort.

Thank you for the reference! I found this paper here It has the table, and claims it is from a book published in 1985! Quoting the paper; So, these numbers aren't for students who started out as "STEM majors" (a term which didn't even exist in 1985), and then switched majors. These numbers just talk about the distribution of SAT Math scores for graduates with a Natural Science degree. And, as someone above says, it makes total sense that at these institutions, all of which are private liberal arts schools, the science majors tend to have higher math SAT scores.

Which department? It's not like there a "STEM" department anywhere. I bet you my dog-eared WTM that there isn't single Math major at Harvard with a 580 Math SAT score.