| ▲ | throwaway21321 7 hours ago |
| 1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that? |
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| ▲ | lunar-whitey 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system. For reference: > Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021). https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. |
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| ▲ | admissionsguy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system. That doesn't matter for the op's point. Students starting from this base won't get good in 4 years. |
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| ▲ | cvoss 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education. |
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| ▲ | delichon 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wish it were dubious. I recently worked with 11th grade Algebra 2 students in New Mexico and found exactly that, and worse. Most couldn't begin to do algebra because they couldn't do simple addition and subtraction. Out of a class of 24 there were two who were arguably ready for it. But everyone is moved forward anyway. I understand your skepticism because I was shocked by it. The teachers said it all went down the drain during Covid and has not recovered. It must severely limit what they can learn in college. | |
| ▲ | TehShrike 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If the college would accept someone like that, they probably don't aim to take their students to a very high level. | |
| ▲ | zetanor 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If a university's administration overlooks a complete failure of the student selection process, it's easy to imagine that it may well overlook a complete failure of the professor selection process. The price of admission is also way too steep to wind up being the peer of mental 8th graders. | | |
| ▲ | ponector 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is it a failure of the process? The selection process is to pick people who willing to pay, not who can solve equations. | | |
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| ▲ | rahimnathwani 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is incorrect. It's 1 in ~50. Still bad! 8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6 8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50. |
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| ▲ | tzs 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Shouldn't that be 8.5% x 75% since you want the percent who could not answer it? | | |
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| ▲ | xboxnolifes 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The more important question is do they learn to solve it, fail out, or just get pushed through? One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine. |
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| ▲ | galleywest200 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At my liberal arts and sciences college about 10 years ago my entry level biology teacher straight up said to the class that if people are having trouble with some of this math on the board to go home and learn algebra tonight. | |
| ▲ | nradov 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | None of those are "fine". The problem is that such students aren't college material and shouldn't be admitted in the first place. | |
| ▲ | kaashif 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If standards aren't lowered and they're just failed out, that's fine eventually, but I would prefer it to be fine from day 1. |
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| ▲ | Beijinger 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My roommate can solve this. And he just turned 6. I gave him today some equations with two unknowns.... |
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| ▲ | Beijinger 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why the Downvote? It is true. | | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I can’t do a standing backflip. This is a true statement and contributes the same amount to a discussion about higher education in the US as “I know a kid that can do algebra” | |
| ▲ | SanjayMehta 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's due to your username; they think you're a troll. | | |
| ▲ | Beijinger 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well. I love Beijing. But I am not Chinese, nor do I currently live in China. Unfortunately. |
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| ▲ | fragmede 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes. | |
| ▲ | 11101010001100 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It may come across as bragging to some. You can decide if that is fair. | | |
| ▲ | Beijinger 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, if someone feels extremely inferior, true. Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation. I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns. | | |
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| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.) I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that? |
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| ▲ | Cheer2171 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that? Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood? Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods? | | |
| ▲ | deaddodo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded? California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions. That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline. 1 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ | | |
| ▲ | lunar-whitey 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically. For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report: > States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED670929.pdf |
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| ▲ | roenxi 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture). Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality. | | |
| ▲ | AngryData 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The top end may not be limited by money, but the bottom of education is, especially when it comes to public k-12 schools. I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year. | |
| ▲ | lunar-whitey 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves. | | |
| ▲ | Aeolun 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | All those downstream effects from a functional social security service. |
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| ▲ | okigan 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most are overpaying in taxes for what they are getting. Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts. | | |
| ▲ | lunar-whitey 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves. |
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| ▲ | derwiki 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | San Francisco USD’s lottery system has entered the chat |
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