I've been getting the same feeling at UT Austin for a long time.

At UT Austin, there is a 10% rule that has crippled the standard to which students are held. The 10% rule states that any student in the top 10% of their graduating high school class is automatically admitted to the university; no questions asked. When you consider the range of quality among high schools in a state as large as Texas, you can imagine the disparity between the valedictorian of the best public school vs. the 9.99%-ranked student of the worst one.

As a result, the intro classes are populated with the type of students mentioned in the article -- those that are there for the wrong reasons, and don't really have any direction. The later classes suffer from this to a lesser extent, but the university's leniency when it comes to failing classes and the length it takes to receive a diploma is still problematic (some students take up to 6, 7 years to graduate).

Thus, the solution is to isolate oneself among the outstanding students, i.e., in honors and graduate classes, in computer science in my case (or any other difficult field that acts as a natural filter), where the top students reside, who are truly excellent and stand among those from any top school.

Case in point: I am often surprised to meet students that were accepted to top-notch schools - -- but couldn't enroll for one reason or another, such as money, that I wouldn't consider outstanding students. I wonder if a more competitive school would be "easier" because I would be pushed to excellence instead of striving for excellence in spite of a standard of mediocrity.

That said, Computer Science at UT is an excellent and competitive program. This is true of most of the hard sciences, math, physics, and a few others, but I truly question the validity of certain degrees...

Some of the most successful people people I know graduated in so called 'less valid majors'. The real world requires a different skillset than just memorizing what a euler path is for the exam next week.

Please don't misinterpret my post -- it wasn't intended to bash certain majors. I should have pointed out that many fields are a "catch-all," i.e., those which students default to that either lack direction or greater ambition in their studies. Take psychology, for example; while psychology is a VERY difficult science of which little is understood, and much has to be discovered, it does not have a rigorous workload, and doesn't provide the curricular challenges that the majors I mentioned do. I use this as an example because my sister plans to study in psychology, and I have preached this lesson to her repeatedly; that it is most commonly the largest major at universities, and thus the "catch-all"; therefore, the lowest common denominator is reduced to a minimum for the standards of that school. At UT, that is quite low. That is not to say that all psychology majors will be unsuccessful -- of the top of my head, I can think of two brilliant contributors to my field of study, computer science, that were psychologists (Minsky and Licklider) -- but rather, that their journey toward success will be hampered by an expectation of mediocrity.

Though I disagree with the practice, there is a reason behind the 10% rule at UT. I think many people in this nation would be surprised to find out what would happen without rules like this at our better state schools. I'll save you the details, suffice it to say that whites would disappear from Georgia Tech, UTexas, UWisconsin and the like almost overnight. Again, as a conservative, it is abhorrent to me, it's essentially affirmative action for white kids. That said, I do understand what the people who run these schools are attempting to do with rules like this.

I am missing your point; the people running UT have the 10% rule in place to achieve the exact opposite effect: to increase diversity within the student body. Therefore, I believe you mean to say that anybody BUT whites would disappear, i.e. black/hispanic/<underrepresented minority>.

Unless, of course, you are implying that the 10% rule attracts whites, somehow.

While I have witnessed the 10% rule opening doors for many students -- as a hispanic student, many of my hispanic peers would simply not have had the opportunity of a first-class eduction -- I don't believe a general universal rule is the answer, but, rather, admissions should be examined case-by-case.

I think the real point of the 10% rule and rules like it (here at KU it's a 20% rule), is to make the college decision really easy for those desirable top-of-the-class students. Hell, it worked on me. I was #2 in my HS class, and the fact that I was automatically accepted (and offered scholarships to boot) really made me not want to bother with a real college search. I had better things to do (or so I thought at the time) my senior year than tour colleges and figure out financing.

Think about it. The average state school is not going to be attracting a large population of out-of-state students. Here at KU we attract many for our Journalism/Social Welfare schools and our Med School Campus, but the vast majority are from Kansas or Missouri. It is in the University's interest to try and lock in the local HS talent as soon as possible, before that talent has the chance to look at a brilliant school in California or Boston. Without such rules, said local talent would be less likely to stay local, and state schools would have an even higher ratio of drink-yourself-retarded students to academic all-stars than they already do.

He assumes that the main value of a college education should be traditional education. For many students, college offers the first opportunity to live on their own away from home but in a substantially less frightening environment than the "real world", i.e. college allows you to practice swimming in the shallow end before hopping into the deep end.

That, plus the friendships and connections you get from college, may well be worth the price of admission, even if it isn't what you (or your parents) are paying for.

I have a friend that works in the registrar's office at my alma mater. He was, just the other day, bitching about some helicopter mom calling up to drop a class for her son. Before you write this off as some random freshman momma's boy, know that the son in question was a junior that was majoring in business. Inspires confidence doesn't it?

I wonder if his mom will manage his employees when he inevitably gets put in charge of someone someday. I think colleges are definitely diluted nowdays, so the degree means little more than "I had the money and time to finish it," but you can still excel in your education there if you choose to do so.

I grew up in the UK and now live in the US. In both countries a college education has gone from being something of value to waste of time due to lowering of standards.

Leaving no child behind will probably destroy what little respect anybody has left for a college degree.

I tend to agree. A lot of folks in a lot of colleges are there for the wrong reason. Make highschool education more comprehensive and don't require most of the population to waste another 4 years just so they can get a "decent" job.

Related:

"Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University"

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm

I feel like more and more this dumbing down of college leads into making undergraduate degrees a second high school diploma.

That begs the suggestion that grad school becomes the "new" college, but that kind of idea isn't too fun in the Startup Crowd.

First UCLA gets creamed by SC and now this.

Oh yes, let's return college to its former status of being only for the elite.

Why do you think so many people go to college? Because it's a practical necessity for most decent-paying jobs. Not to do the job, but to get hired in the first place.

Telling people they shouldn't be in school is akin to telling them they don't deserve a decent standard of living.

As long as having a decent standard of living means having to make a living, and as long as making a living still means being employed for most people, then as long as employers still require degrees, people will go to college to get them.

There's a general solution that solves a lot of problems and is not specific only to this one. Make employment obviated, preferably by technological advance, so humans no longer have to slog away at mind-numbing "jobs" under the threat of homelessness and starvation.

That's the humane approach. It will do away with crimes of poverty, television advertising (people watch TV to escape, which they won't need to do when there's nothing to escape from), and college over-enrollment, among a zillion other problems.

Thing is, I don't think employers ask for a college degree because the job actually requires one. I think they do it to separate the top 25% from the bottom 75%. A degree is the easiest way to look at an applicant and be able to say "That person is not stupid" (whether or not that judgment is true...)

Now, even if everybody got a college degree, there would still be a top 25% and a bottom 75%. And I don't think that employers would suddenly stop discriminating because suddenly everyone was qualified. I think they'd add other qualifications, like "must have a masters degree" or "must have commit privileges on a major open-source project".

Then all the workers are back where they started, except that they're out $150k for their college degree.

I guess the only way to win is to refuse to play the game. Which is why most of us are on this site, I guess...

Yes. Once upon a time, businesses took responsibility for training their employees. Now they expect the student to come to them having blown a huge wad of cash on speculative investment in education for a job. One that they aren't sure they really like, that they'll probably abandon in 10 years anyway, and where the employer considers them disposable.

In most cases, the state also subsidizes this huge gamble.

I think, for the first time ever, I wish I could click the up arrow on a comment more than once.

Thanks for that.

Economists have studied this as signalling in the labor market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29#The_... Basically, employees tend to get more education than they really need just as a way to stand out from the crowd and signal their value to employers.

> I think they do it to separate the top 25% from the bottom 75%.

Just because only 1 in 4 people do X doesn't mean those are the TOP 25%.

I agree with the first part of your post, and I don't even think those points would be disputed by the author of the article.

But the problem arises because levels are lowered across the board. Even the best minds have to go trough the shit that undergraduate education has become, and their potential will be underdeveloped because they are not pushed to do their best, leading to a lot of lost potential (and a possible degradation of scientific work and standards?).

abossy said in another comment: "I wonder if a more competitive school would be 'easier' because I would be pushed to excellence instead of striving for excellence in spite of a standard of mediocrity."

I absolutely feel his pain.

- Master Student in Computer Systems Engineering at SDU

Yes, let's! Most of the people in my university classes weren't there because they wanted to learn. They were there because they wanted a job.

Remove the artificial credential that school provides, and knowledge-seekers and job-seekers might all be better off. Why torture people with electives in English literature if they're not interested? Or for that matter, mandatory course in computer science if all they want is a Joe Javahead job? These are adults we're talking about, not children.

i wonder if the world would be better once we can cheaply subsidize everyone's basic needs. i think everyone would just become even more of a zombie, because electronic entertainment is so easy and you don't have the office as an automatic social life.