just a quick clarifier: no single school had 94; they were distributed among several schools.

my high school in kansas had 10 valedictorians. 9 were girls whose sole electives were home ec classes; one was the only one of them to have taken honors/a.p. classes. all of the 10 had 4.0 gpas. in other words, honors classes operated as a detriment, not an advantage, because honors classes are more demanding. also, in practice, honors classes were less subject to artificial grade inflation because the grades were more subject to scrutiny than the fluff classes.

in contrast, my high school in new mexico (i moved halfway through) had one valedictorian with a perfect 4.4 gpa. the extra 0.4 came from honors/a.p. classes (if i remember correctly, each honors class boosted the grade by 0.2, up to two per semester).

but that was 20 years ago. i certainly expect that much of the current grade inflation stems from no child left behind. not to mention the reluctance to accept the sometimes minuscule differences between high grade earners, another symptom of the unwillingness to accept real differences and the promotion of self-esteem over hard grades.

Cool, so now “Salutatorian” means “slacker?”

I think the thing is that when everyone is shooting for top grades, there’s going to be an awful lot of overlap, and trying to differentiate between them starts to seem petty. When you have a high school full of high achievers and the scheme of determining who’s valedictorian comes down to figuring out whether to award more GPA points to the student who got an A+ in AP Chemistry vs. the student with an A+ in calculus vs. the student with an A+ in the literature class they took at the local college, you’re making a distinction without a difference. My college had no “valedictorian.” There was just admission to Phi Beta Kappa or other various honor societies. It doesn’t strike me that creating the same system in certain top-level high schools is such a bad idea.

My high school, incidentally, had a valedictorian but did not calculate any numerical class rankings of the students beyond that, not counting admission to the honor society.

I was at my nieces graduation a few weeks ago and they had forty sevn people hraduate with better than a four point o, out of a class of a little more than five hundred.  Weird to think you need almost straight A’s to get into the top ten percent. 

I kind of wonder what is going to happen to all these people when they start getting honest feedback. My guess is they won’t take it well.

Sounds like the sensible thing is to do away with the custom of valedictorian, since it seems essentially meaningless.

Yeah, valedictorian has a specific meaning that applies to one person; if you’d don’t like choosing a top dog, then use “summa cum laude” and nobody will think its weird.

there’s going to be an awful lot of overlap, and trying to differentiate between them starts to seem petty.

I have to disagree.  My school had three perfect 4.0 students.  The school had an application process to determine which of the three deserved the valedictorian honor.  It wasn’t petty to give that honor to the candidate (a friend of mine, fwiw) who participated in numerous extracurricular activities and took many more AP classes than the other two candidates.  If there weren’t a clear distinction between a number of candidates, I’d understand splitting the honor among a few of them, but I’m skeptical that that’s what’s going on here.

I wouldn’t want to sit through ninety four validictorian speeches that is for sure.  They should either pick one or do away with it all together.

@ Tyro - yeah, the magnet school I went to didn’t have rank or valedictorians, both because of what you mention (among high achieving kids, it’s ridiculous to make those minute distinctions), and because the administration figured that such a rigorous academic environment was competitive enough as it was.

I kind of wonder what is going to happen to all these people when they start getting honest feedback. My guess is they won’t take it well.

Of course, it’s simply not possible that there could be 47 students who worked hard and deserved their good grades.  Of course.

If it’s the difference between getting into Harvard or not, downgrading someone because of sliver thin differences doesn’t quite seem fair.  This seems like a better solution.

Speaking of speeches and honors and stuff, to replace the valedictorian system, we had an auditions to speak at grad, and there was a “Hall Of Fame” which had 5 especially outstanding students inducted each year.  Those students were honored at graduation, but did not give speeches.  Mainly because 2 or 3 out of the 5 would inevitably be kids who were great at calculus or physics and broke out in hives at the thought of having to give a speech in front of thousands of people.

the school had an application process to determine which of the three deserved the valedictorian honor.

Sounds nice in theory. In practice it sounds like a way for the teachers to bestow favors on the top student they like the most or the one who most closely adhered to the teacher’s cultural expectations (not saying this is what happened with your friend, just that I see how it could happen). As I said: a distinction without a difference. (or just call it the “citizenship prize” and let the winner give a graduation speech)

I was never anywhere in the running for valedictorian, but it strikes me that there’s always a lot of high-stress jockeying for position once you’re fighting between positions 1, 2, and 3. As far as I’m concerned, the only honor worth taking home is the college admissions acceptance letter. But when you have dozens of people vying for a trophy that ends up coming down to hair splitting between a dozen students with identical grades, all of whom have wanted the prize since they were 13, you’re setting yourself up for a big mess.

Re “the difference between getting into Harvard”, our school included letters with our transcripts explaining the nature of the school and their policy on rank.  It apparently works, as an unusually high proportion of my fellow alums end up at Ivies, Caltech, MIT, and the like.  There were also plenty of other achievements and honors to be won.

Yeah, my school had a huge number of valedictorians. Interestingly, none of them could take a standardized test to save their life. They all all ended up at no name schools.

My high school had seven valedictorians, of which I was one. The ridiculous part was that we all gave speeches, and to save on time we had to give them in groups of two or three. I would have been 100% fine with having only person give a speech (and with that person not being me), but honestly, I would have been very reluctant to give up the word “valedictorian” for a term like “summa cum laude,” not because I was particularly attached to the label, but because “valedictorian” was more impressive on college applications.

Incidentally, the year after I graduated, a mom was angry that her son didn’t get to be valedictorian because he had gotten one B, so she campaigned until the school did away with valedictorians altogether. It doesn’t really matter how much you try to dilute the term to prevent hurt feelings, someone will always be outraged that their snowflake didn’t get the very highest honor possible.

And you laughed when I pointed out how pervasive and LITERAL the everybody gets a trophy mentality has become.

My high school, incidentally, had a valedictorian but did not calculate any numerical class rankings of the students beyond that, not counting admission to the honor society.

My urban public high school did not rank beyond the valedictorian and salutatorian.  Then again, most high school classmates placed much more importance on whether someone was a Westinghouse/Intel Science semi-finalist/finalist, a member of the competitive math/science/debate teams, and whether they made it into HYP/MIT/Caltech/Carnegie Mellon or not.  It’s really sad that the cutthroat and ridiculousness of the atmosphere over this got to the point that even schools like UChicago, Cornell, Columbia, and most small private liberal arts colleges other than Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst were regarded by the top 20% as “schools for the intellectually challenged”. 

I think the thing is that when everyone is shooting for top grades, there’s going to be an awful lot of overlap, and trying to differentiate between them starts to seem petty. When you have a high school full of high achievers and the scheme of determining who’s valedictorian comes down to figuring out whether to award more GPA points to the student who got an A+ in AP Chemistry vs. the student with an A+ in calculus vs. the student with an A+ in the literature class they took at the local college, you’re making a distinction without a difference. My college had no “valedictorian.” There was just admission to Phi Beta Kappa or other various honor societies. It doesn’t strike me that creating the same system in certain top-level high schools is such a bad idea.

That was certainly the case at my urban public magnet where the differences between being a Valedictorian and Salutatorian could be as little as hundredth or even a ten-thousandth of a point difference on a scale out of 100.  To even make it to their level, your 4 year average has to be practically at the 99/100 mark. 

As for allocating different grades on the basis of whether the class was accelerated regular(“The slow track”), AP track (standard), or AP/private study/university courses, they never did that when I was attending.  However, the way my school dealt with that issue is to make a detailed note about which track the courses/program the student pursued.  Then again, it ultimately mattered very little in terms of college admissions because our school’s reputation was such that even students taking the “slow track” were regarded highly even by the first-tier schools.  This was shown not only by how practically a quarter of my graduating class were admitted to at least one Ivy league school or their direct non-Ivy equivalents like MIT and Caltech, but also how more of us ended up graduating from such schools than were initially admitted by “transferring up” after our first or second year in college. 

Not too long after I graduated, there was a serious controversy over whether my high school should change its grading system to a letter grading system on the 4.0 scale like most colleges to “reduce the cutthroat level of academic competition.”  One compelling argument against the school opting for the 4.0 scale was that it would provide the student who had the most socio-economic privilege and leisure time as a result to pursue more extracurriculars which gives him/her additional advantages while the slight hit he/she takes on his/her GPA will be obscured whereas the working-class student who has to work 20-30 hours a week afterschool and on weekends to support his/her family will be severely disadvantaged, even if his/her GPA was 2-3 points higher than the more privileged student on the scale out of 100 points.

This post reads like Andy Rooney/Bill O’Reilly rant about how valedictorians ain’t what it used to be, including the reactionary assumption this must be a sign of PC grade inflation and coddling, because lord knows them damn kids aren’t earning those grades honestly. I feel like I’m reading a pro-choice version of The Corner.

So go back to tracking/weighting with quantifiable grades for honors and AP courses.  Many years ago, it went something like this:

Remedial aka basic courses = 3.0 for an A
Regular courses = 4.0 for an A
Honors = 5.0 for an A
AP = 4.0 for an A

I don’t really understand why valedictorian = speech.  High academic ability doesn’t necessarily translate to public speaking ability or something interesting to say. 

Is it some kind of weird vestigial left-over from a time when public speaking was a key skill that any well educated university-bound person would have?  Or from before high school was compulsory, when classes were smaller and the valedictorian was expected to be a leader qualified to speak on behalf of the other students?

We had two valedictorians, both girls, who had taken the max number of AP/Honors classes (including Summer Trig, which meant 2 years of Calculus) and who had never received anything less than an A.  The class speech was an elected position—senior who got the most votes got to give it.

As for being valedictorian being the difference between getting into Harvard or not…well, at Stanford there are more valedictorian/perfect SAT/straight A applicants than availability.  Weighted grades don’t actually matter, and refusing to rank the class doesn’t either, since Admissions looks at what courses you took and the reputation of the high school combined with your SAT/ACT score for a very TINY part of the process.  It’s just to prove you can handle the work.  You should take the most rigorous classes you can and get As.

Whether or not your school ‘weights’ your grades or has a dozen “valedictorians” doesn’t really affect elite school admissions.  Some schools offer more classes and some try to play games to get their students into the top tier schools.  Admissions can see through it.

Your essays and your teacher recommendations (which should be personal and should state that you are one of the top students said teacher has ever had) are what get you in to the most elite schools.  Again, they get to take <10% of their applicants, so they have an abundance of riches.  Their entire freshmen class could be killed in an orientation accident, and all the second choices would still be just as qualified.

t’s really sad that the cutthroat and ridiculousness of the atmosphere over this got to the point that even schools like UChicago, Cornell, Columbia, and most small private liberal arts colleges other than Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst were regarded by the top 20% as “schools for the intellectually challenged”.

Yeah.  I was one of the extreme under-achievers who “only” got into Tulane, NYU, Emerson, Boston U, and Carnegie Mellon.  Which were the only prestigious schools I applied to.  I knew kids who applied to 15 schools, were accepted by 10, and were heartbroken because they got into Cornell but not Harvard.

If it’s the difference between getting into Harvard or not, downgrading someone because of sliver thin differences doesn’t quite seem fair.  This seems like a better solution.

From chatting with some friends and acquaintances who worked undergraduate admissions at Harvard and other Ivy/Ivy-level schools, whether someone is a valedictorian or not actually makes very little difference.  Especially considering the fact they and other peer institutions receive so many applications from HS valedictorians each year. 

According to them a common issue which comes up is how the valedictorian student took more “gut” courses far below his/her demonstrated capabilities as opposed to the admitted candidate whose class standing was slightly or even visibly below that of the valedictorian but whose entire 4 year record was filled with him/her taking the most challenging courses the school offered and opportunities available to him/her or the fact the lower ranked student who was admitted faced much more personal adversity due to poverty, medical circumstances, family, etc and/or he/she had some unique talent which the admissions committee felt was noteworthy, desirable, and distinguished him/her from the rest of the applicant pool.

Our school solved the problem by electing a valedictorian. Only students with high GPAs were eligible to run, but in the end the graduands picked the person they thought would give the most meaningful and entertaining speech at convocation. I thought that was a pretty good solution, seeing as the grads and their families are the ones whohave to sit through the ceremony.

By the time the valedictorian has been decided, the college admissions letters have already gone out, and the students have already made their choices about where to attend. The valedictory award doesn’t give you anything other than bragging rights and a fond memory.

I don’t think the proliferation of valedictorians has anything to do with grade inflation but rather with more parents who are focusing on making sure their kids are top students who get admitted to top colleges. Back in the day, it wasn’t considered unusual for someone in the top 10% of their class to go to a local college in their state/region. I think the combination of increased income inequality and greater exchange of information about what other top students are doing has turned admission to top universities and access to their opportunities into a nationwide competition.

It’s psycho parents, the same kind that get waaayyyy to into how well their kids do on spelling bees in the elementary school.

Or its like these dipshits who call everybody who straps on a pair of pointe shoes a ballerina. Look. Just because you put on combat boots doesn’t make you a frickin’ general. Yeesh.

It’s really sad that the cutthroat and ridiculousness of the atmosphere over this got to the point that even schools like UChicago, Cornell, Columbia, and most small private liberal arts colleges other than Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst were regarded by the top 20% as “schools for the intellectually challenged”.

Somebody should point out them that even today only about 32% of the population has a Bachelors degree from anywhere, though sometimes you wouldn’t know it by how how the media talk.

Hell, seems it may be lower than that:

http://dragonflyeye.net/jongreenbaum/files/2010/01/300px-Educational_attainment1.jpg

Yeah.  I was one of the extreme under-achievers who “only” got into Tulane, NYU, Emerson, Boston U, and Carnegie Mellon.  Which were the only prestigious schools I applied to.

Interestingly enough, Carnegie Mellon is the only school on your list that would be considered prestigious by the students at my high school….and that was only if you were majoring in the STEM fields.  Even my high school guidance counselor felt the need to make a note that other than STEM and the fine arts schools, the rest of that school is “mediocre at best.”

As for NYU, I know it is now considered highly coveted and even a “new Ivy” which is a shock considering how it was considered a safety school where more than a third of my class were admitted and a fellow Asian-American underachiever classmate not only managed to get in, but also received a small scholarship to enter as a pre-med major…..something that would be impossible today. 

As for BU, I had a high school history teacher who dubbed it “P-U” and said it provided a “Mediocre state university education at a Ivy-league price” to express his disdain for the rigor of their academic programs.

Then again, that high school guidance counselor also told us how he strongly barred a 95 average scoring classmate from a previous graduating class who wanted to apply to BC because he was a big Eagles football fan because he felt BC was “far too low-level” for a student of his caliber and had him apply to several Ivies instead. 

Somebody should point out them that even today only about 32% of the population has a Bachelors degree from anywhere, though sometimes you wouldn’t know it by how how the media talk.

They wouldn’t care very much as the atmosphere of my urban public magnet was not only the expectation that EVERYONE is supposed to go to college, but that you MUST go to HYP/MIT/Caltech/Stanford/Williams/Amherst/Swarthmore or be considered a complete and utter worthless failure. 

Interesting fact I stumbled across: the average LSAT of a Harvard undergrad is only around a 167. So (for those pursuing a legal career) a lot of folks are busting their ass to get into a top undergrad, only to be barred from a top law school.

It also is a shame that the honors programs at state schools are overlooked. I have heard great things about UT’s Plan II Honors. Plus, it is tough to beat Austin for an enjoyable college experience.

They wouldn’t care very much as the atmosphere of my urban public magnet was not only the expectation that EVERYONE is supposed to go to college, but that you MUST go to HYP/MIT/Caltech/Stanford/Williams/Amherst/Swarthmore or be considered a complete and utter worthless failure

Being butthurt because you graduated from an average state school instead of Swathmore is like throwing a fit because you “only” got a Chevy Corvette instead of a Ferrari or Rolls Royce, while the vast majority of the population (educationally speaking) are driving Kia Rios.

Opo at #9, I don’t doubt that kids work hard and deserve their grades, but high school is not college. It’s true now more than ever. I’ve worked within a public school system and we worked with high school youth and tracked them into college (mentoring and other post-secondary support). Pretty much all the students in our program struggled in college, including IB students, full-ride scholarship recipients, etc. There are many societal barriers to post-secondary achievement by “at-risk” students - racism, immigration status, sexism, poverty. These youth are dealing with just about every kind of oppression there is. And succeeding. But.  One of those barriers is the sorry state of public education in urban areas, so that even the highest-achieving students are in for a shock when they start college. Many of the youth we work with will, in fact, say that college is their first experience of real evaluation by teachers. It’s an and/both situation - kids work their asses off in school these days (while maintaining jobs and unbelievable amounts of extracurricular activities) AND many public school systems are in a sorry state and are doing a piss-poor job of preparing students for college. Of course, those public schools are criminally underfunded and unsupported, so it’s not all their fault. But I could go on about this…

Being butthurt because you graduated from an average state school instead of Swathmore is like throwing a fit because you “only” got a Chevy Corvette instead of a Ferrari or Rolls Royce, while the vast majority of the population (educationally speaking) are driving Kia Rios.

Great point! Only thing is that the butthurt is not only for those who attended an average state school, but even people who attended schools like Cornell and Columbia because those were disdained as “safety schools” and “schools for the intellectually challenged”. 

There was also the idea that students at my high school should set far higher standards and expectations for themselves compared to counterparts who attended regular public or even some private schools.  Fortunately, since I was the “John McCain” of my graduating class and knew I had no chance of even doing well enough to graduate with respectable “average” grades, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as many of my classmates, some of whom are still undergoing therapy years after graduation because of that hypercompetitive BS. 

Another dimension, however, to many of their desires to attend an Ivy/Ivy-level school was a desire to be continuously challenged academically. 

The experience of high school classmates who attended many of the State and City colleges was that the academic rigor was extremely underwhelming, even in the honors program.  Had two classmates who managed 4.0+ GPAs in their year at one of the top CUNY campuses’ honors programs before they decided they were wasting their time because they pulled it off without ever having to study or even opening their books and the school bureaucracy refused to allow them to register for the more advanced courses they were more than ready for.

Elena, the same is true for rural kids, even ones from good homes. I went to the U of Michigan, an excellent school by any standards but a public university and thus subject to the awful godbag rednecks in the state legislature, who compelled the U to accept the top two students from every single high school in Michigan. You could tell who these people were from the day they got to Ann Arbor: they’d been told they were the smartest kid in Butthola MI for years but they were woefully ill-prepared to cope with all the highly competitive suburban kids or a culturally diverse, interesting environment. Few of them lasted beyond their freshman year and they all always seemed pretty depressed.

I don’t really understand why valedictorian = speech.  High academic ability doesn’t necessarily translate to public speaking ability or something interesting to say.

Is it some kind of weird vestigial left-over from a time when public speaking was a key skill that any well educated university-bound person would have?  Or from before high school was compulsory, when classes were smaller and the valedictorian was expected to be a leader qualified to speak on behalf of the other students?

Opoponax,

I believe that providing the valedictorian the venue to make his/her speech not only because he/she is supposed to be a leader/role model for the rest of the student body, but also as a way to showcase his/her “greatness” as THE ONE with the highest GPA in the school.  It is not too different from the idea of winners of highly prestigious prizes like the Nobel prizes being invited to give a public speech upon receiving their prize or an Oscar winner being asked the same upon receiving his/her award.

exholt - just how does the admissions department “know” all this?  I mean c’mon, they can’t be at every high school across the country (unless you’re saying that they only “really” consider applicants from certain schools.  Even if a student takes “rigorous sounding courses, that can vary from teacher to teacher and year to year - for example, our local hs had a very respected science teacher, legendary classes, AP classes, etc. recently retire.  hired to take her place was a total screw up who barely taught and ended the year in scandal.  Our public secondary ed is overall in such disarray nationwide, and varies so greatly from state to state and district to district - I pity admissions offices, but I don’t credit them with the omniscience that you seem to.

YEs, elena, it is their fault.  No amount of money can change attitudes that students are there for the continued employment, the raison d’etre of school administrators.  HS is more and more a warehouse.

exholt - just how does the admissions department “know” all this?  I mean c’mon, they can’t be at every high school across the country (unless you’re saying that they only “really” consider applicants from certain schools.  Even if a student takes “rigorous sounding courses, that can vary from teacher to teacher and year to year - for example, our local hs had a very respected science teacher, legendary classes, AP classes, etc. recently retire.  hired to take her place was a total screw up who barely taught and ended the year in scandal.  Our public secondary ed is overall in such disarray nationwide, and varies so greatly from state to state and district to district - I pity admissions offices, but I don’t credit them with the omniscience that you seem to.

It is not omniscience, but the fact that they do prefer admitting students from certain public and private high schools with demonstrated track records of graduating students who do well at their colleges.  Since some public schools like the urban public magnet have had a long demonstrated track record of this in the Ivy/Ivy-level college admissions officers, they tend to prefer to admit more students from schools like mine to increase their intake of the “academic achievers” than they would from public or even private schools whose demonstrated track record has not been as impressive.  Admissions officers do keep tabs on which schools have strong academic reputations and tend to look more favorably on applicants from those schools than from their average public/private counterparts.  They also keep tabs on schools which have a problematic record in this regard and thus, tend to look much more skeptically upon their applicants, especially if there was a definitive historical pattern of them floundering to graduation or worse, not finishing within 4-5 years.

I graduated from high school in 1991—so, a while ago.  There were about 450 kids per class, and in a typical graduating class there were 10-20 who’d gotten a 4.0.  So, my high school didn’t pick a Valedictorian.  All us super-high-achievers got our picture in the paper, and anyone in the graduating class who wanted to make a speech could audition to deliver one.  They picked the two best speeches for the graduation ceremony.

FTR, you got a 4 for an A, an A+, or a A-, a 3 for a B, B+ or B-, etc.  Teachers determined their own grade scale—I had one class where you needed only an 87 to get an A, and another where you needed a 93.  An A in AP Calc was worth a 4, and an A in Typing 1 was worth a 4, so yeah, you could avoid hard courses to protect your GPA if you chose (and in fact the Calc teacher was a notorious hardass and required 93% on tests to get an A). 

The really fun way to protect your GPA was to take classes at the local university.  Calc at the university was rumored to be easier than Calc with my high school’s Calculus teacher, and your grade went on a separate university transcript, not into your high school GPA.  Of course, your parents had to foot the bill, so this was a door that was open to the more financially comfortable kids, not the poor kids.

Given all that, the cum laude type system we used made a lot of sense to me.  Honestly, I have concerns about eroding standards at the high school level (particularly in writing) but the endless, endless whining from adults about how kids these days are emotional pansies because we don’t tell them they suck often enough is getting really old.

FYI, in my opinion the #1 reason to apply to the “elite” schools is because they guarantee to meet 100% of your demonstrated need through grants and federal loans. The net result is that if you can get into it and you aren’t rich, Harvard is far and away the best education bargain going.

Hmm - is “Class” by Paul Fussell still an appropriate comment on the American education system and status?

Frankly exholt, they should then be sued, especially if they are taking, as they are, what can be really high application fees, and giving only cursory glances at the app, if it doesn’t come from a student of the “right” school.

I’d like to believe otherwise.  Sadly, and cynically, I think the exclusive incestuousness you describe is probably the case.

Naomi, there’s a whole bunch of space on the continuum between “you suck” and no one can ever,  ever, ever, get any reward for being/doing the least little bit better than anyone else because someone’s feelings will get hurt. 

It’s really harmful, for one.  I mean we ARE doing this at all levels.  How the heck does someone ever do any (self) improvement when they can never get a straight answer or honest test of their abilities?  If we were trading grades for detailed individual conferences that would be great- “well Joe, while you did very well on getting the concepts of calculus, your inattention to detail and lack of checking your work, not to mention the sloppy way you write.  So, Joe’s parents, while we will pass your child in calculus, we do recommend he take a remedial penmanship class before he graduates.  (or it could be the converse, concepts bad - detail= great!)   

But, I haven’t heard of anyone using a non-quantifiable grading system lately.

phylosopher, universities really do take into account the quality of a high school when evaluating applications. In some cases they know the high school by reputation. In other cases they infer by looking into (or out and out asking on the application) the number of AP classes available and looking at a student’s grades and class rank vs. how they actually performed on their standardized tests and AP exams. Students who max out all the opportunities available at their high school are looking upon more favorably than students who have a lot of opportunities but don’t take advantage of them. Though both groups lose out to the students who have lots of opportunities and take advantage of them.

The problem is that a lot of high schools and a lot of their students simply don’t know “what’s possible” and don’t encourage their best students to apply to the best possible colleges and don’t push the admissions committee to consider their application seriously. There are still many places where focusing on getting admitted to an elite college isn’t even in the field of view of even the best students, even though in many cases the need-based financial aid might make it a better deal.

Frankly exholt, they should then be sued, especially if they are taking, as they are, what can be really high application fees, and giving only cursory glances at the app, if it doesn’t come from a student of the “right” school.

I’d like to believe otherwise.  Sadly, and cynically, I think the exclusive incestuousness you describe is probably the case.

A large part of it is they want to admit students from schools who have a demonstrated record of successfully completing their programs and/or students from schools who have the highest likelihood of becoming future generous alums donating large sums to the alumni fund and/or have well-connected parents in big business, politics, entertainment, law, etc. 

Unless the given high school has a demonstrated record of turning out future generous alums with wealthy well-connected families and/or turning out academic achievers who will make a great impact in the world, many admissions offices do not want to take a chance on students from non-wealthy/well-connected families from average or worst, mediocre schools who may flounder to graduation with a C or lower average or worse, flunk/drop out before graduation….especially when they have so many applicants from highly qualified students from the two types of preferred schools that they have plenty of options to select the most highly academically qualified and/or students from the wealthiest/well-connected families.

The problem is that a lot of high schools and a lot of their students simply don’t know “what’s possible” and don’t encourage their best students to apply to the best possible colleges and don’t push the admissions committee to consider their application seriously.

There is also an element of fear that because said student attended a “public school”, they won’t be able to cope with the rigors of the academic coursework at Ivy/Ivy-level colleges which is seen to be dominated by students from the “better” private schools like Phillip Andover Academy. 

My classmates and I encountered this firsthand with private-school educated classmates at our respective colleges who acted patronizingly towards us because we graduated from an “inferior public school” only to be shocked and dismayed when we ended up excelling in our college careers when many of them ended up floundering or even being suspended or expelled for academic deficiencies.

Heck, I’ve even encountered a clueless university professor at a lower-tier private university who expressed serious concerns about how I would cope at a private college dominated by kids who had the “benefit” of a private school education and even worried I’d be overwhelmed and flunk out. 

Considering all of that, it would not surprise me if such narratives perpetuated by society, educators, and even parents end up beating down so many of those students that they don’t even bother to apply despite the fact their potential may actually far outstrip that of their more privileged private-school educated counterparts.  Saw far too many examples of other working-class scholarship students at my undergrad who attended an average public school and excelled who experienced the same BS narrative from their teachers.  Thankfully, they saw that narrative as the BS that it was and ended up doing quite well for themselves.  Tragically, too many other students from similar backgrounds end up being beaten down by this incessant insidious narratives which influences them to close off what could be a great educational opportunity for them…..  :(

Felagund, that’s really interesting! I have no experience at all with rural educational systems, but what you’re saying makes sense. Rural schools are likely as underfunded as inner city schools and the kids aren’t probably well prepared to deal with academics and big campuses!

Phylosopher, my experience with school personnel is that many of them absolutely have their hearts in the right place. We can all rightly bemoan the HR culture, the warehousing, etc. But, when we describe a youth as “at risk” (and all of us youth workers hate the ugly implications of that label), we know that she/he is likely to have issues obtaining and maintaining employment. I specifically have experience in job readiness aspect of public education, so I know that a lot of these folks are concerned about the students’ ability to use education to support themselves, not about creating an assembly line of employees for corporations. Which is not to say that you don’t have a point. It’s just…complicated, as everything else involving youth.

There is also an element of fear that because said student attended a “public school”, they won’t be able to cope with the rigors of the academic coursework at Ivy/Ivy-level colleges which is seen to be dominated by students from the “better” private schools

It seems like there’s some East Coast/West Coast disconnect on that, too. I went to a quite good public high school on the West Coast—not rare at all, I think—and didn’t have any problems in the East Coast college I attended. But most of my friends, from the East Coast and from private schools, were astonished that public school was not automatically low-end. I had to basically explain it to them as “yes, it was a public school but it was like a private school” but they still acted like I had overcome some kind of adversity when (high school-wise) I hadn’t.

And total cosign on the Ivy-League-schools-are-rich-as-fuck thing. My baby sister attends an Ivy League and she’s getting out of there completely debt-free (her financial aid is mostly just straight-up “here’s some money for you to keep forever”) while I’ll be paying off college loans for quite a while (my school’s financial aid being more like a teeny bit of student employment and helpful links to government loan webpages. :p)

the reactionary assumption this must be a sign of PC grade inflation and coddling, because lord knows them damn kids aren’t earning those grades honestly

HA! Cosign this, too. You can’t argue that this generation of teenagers and young adults doesn’t work its collective ass off. To some extent it’s because getting into top colleges is so competitive—there wasn’t a student in any of my high school classes who didn’t know exactly how hard to was to go where we wanted. And overall we scored higher, did more extracurriculars, took harder classes, than the year before us. Who had worked harder than the year before them. And my baby sister’s class worked harder yet.

My mom was *the* valedictorian for her high school, and that got her into Dartmouth no problem. But that could never be the case now; things are just a lot more competitive than even 10 years ago (and way more expensive, too) so maybe kids are just stepping up to the plate.

exholt, it sounds like you are defending this practice?

The problem is that a lot of high schools and a lot of their students simply don’t know “what’s possible” and don’t encourage their best students to apply to the best possible colleges and don’t push the admissions committee to consider their application seriously.

While one might assume that this is or should be common knowledge for schools, presumably the purview of guidance counselors, how would a student go about “pushing” in your view?

Elena @ #33 - Oh, believe me, I get that.  I just don’t find it to be a symptom of grade inflation that about 10% of your average high school graduating class would do well, academically.  That sounds pretty much par for the course.

Especially since “higher than a 4.0” doesn’t always mean straight A’s, because of the ways that some high schools weight averages.  At one high school I attended, because of the way GPA’s were calculated, I’d have easily graduated with higher than a 4.0, even though I was a B+ student in most areas.  But I digress.

The main reason people I’ve known have had a really hard time in college was not so much that they were coddled by teachers, or over-praised by helicopter parents, or had their grades inflated.  It was because their high schools did not teach writing or critical thinking.  Of course, that is a component of grade inflation, but it’s not usually what people mean when they use that expression.  When I think of “grade inflation”, I think of teachers giving a student a higher score than they probably really deserve.  Not huge curricular changes at the macro level.

Elena, I come at this from a gt perspective.  WHile I agree, there are kids who can make it in four years, there are also gt kids who could easily go right to university or needing only 2-3 years hs. (There are also variations in when a kid should start school anywhere from 4 - 7 and outliers on those). There are also less able students who should be on a five year hs plan from the word go.  And while I’ve encountered some teachers who recognize that - the admins will fight it tooth and nail as a rule - at least in the area I’m from.

If it’s the difference between getting into Harvard or not, downgrading someone because of sliver thin differences doesn’t quite seem fair.

How the fuck can this be the difference between getting into Harvard or not, now that there’s gonna be eleventeen fuckjillion valedictorians applying to Harvard?

It is not too different from the idea of winners of highly prestigious prizes like the Nobel prizes being invited to give a public speech upon receiving their prize or an Oscar winner being asked the same upon receiving his/her award.

Except that it actually is different from both of those things.  Oscar winners who get more than a 30 second “Thanks Mom!” speech are usually performers, or directors and producers who are basically managers, i.e. they speak publicly in front of large-ish groups for a living and are expected to have a corresponding level of charisma.  And most Nobel laureates are academics who presumably have to deliver lectures at conferences and the like. 

Also, I don’t know about the Nobel speeches, but the longest Oscar speech is probably under 2 minutes.  And is expected to be given off the cuff, and to include lists of people the winner would like to thank.  Which doesn’t resemble a commencement speech in any way.

I had to basically explain it to them as “yes, it was a public school but it was like a private school” but they still acted like I had overcome some kind of adversity when (high school-wise) I hadn’t.

Yep, I can totally relate. 

One of the most interesting and disturbing things I found in addition was how so many high priced private schools, even some high profile ones ended up graduating students whose academic requirements were not only far lower than the public high school I attended.  An extreme case was one college classmate who graduated from a private school which only required 2 years of joke non-lab science courses for graduation whereas I was required to take 3 years of lab science courses and and extra year of science electives which included a fascinating course on psycho-pharmacology.  Was also shocked by how many of those private school graduates who were initially so patronizing towards “inferior public school” graduates ended up struggling or even flunking college courses most of us scholarship students considered manageable or even a joke…..and they had far more impressive academic records/test scores than I did. 

Incidentally, one reason why I managed to graduate debt-free despite winning a 75% scholarship was the fact I made a financial killing providing tutoring services to most of those “private school graduates” who realized they badly needed academic tutoring.  Kinda ironic considering I had John McCain level grades in high school while most of my clients were valedictorians or at least within the top 15% of their respective graduating classes.

Opo @ 53, excellent points as well! The two things the youth we worked with struggled with the most were writing and critical thinking. It’s shocking that a kid can graduate with 4.0+, get a full-ride, and end up failing English 101, or even in a remedial class. Developing critical thinking is something colleges should do, I would argue. But it’s really difficult to even keep up with college writing requirements and standards if a solid base was not established in high school.

But I would actually argue that grade inflation is still part of it. Part of it is that 4.0 doesn’t mean A, as you pointed out. Part of it is that some teachers aren’t inclined to really get involved in an overcrowded classroom, so they aren’t teaching to the students’ full potential. So they have the kids do a 2-page paper in an honors class when requiring more work would be called for. Part of it is also very real pressure from higher ups and helicopter parents to pass students who shouldn’t be passing. The mentality of “everyone should go to college” is partly to blame for that, too. It’s a great idea in principle, but it’s not well applied in practice. I want to be sort of vague so as not to “out” myself, or I’d give more specific examples.

just how does the admissions department “know” all this?

In the case of very selective schools where there are a ton of brilliant kids and they have to select carefully who to admit, I would imagine the admissions department looks into things on a case by case basis.  All they have to do is call up the school and ask questions.  Nowadays they probably do a lot of research online.

I’d also imagine that looking at thousands of applications every year, year in, year out, for a living, you start seeing patterns.  The kids who take “English II” and the kids who take “Evolution Of The Novel”.  The kid who has straight A’s, but didn’t take calculus*.  The kid who is awesome, but has terrible grades the second half of sophomore year.  Which, it turns out, is when her parents split up.  Career admissions people have seen a lot.

*Though this frustrated me at the time, because why should I waste time sucking at calculus and trashing my average, when I dislike calculus and will never use it again beyond this semester, seeing as I’ll inevitably major in the humanities?

exholt, it sounds like you are defending this practice?

Not really.  Just explaining the reasoning for their actions from their perspective and how it has lasted without many more legal challenges. 

Also, I don’t know about the Nobel speeches,

I don’t know about Nobel speeches, but I have been invited to some academic awards ceremonies for academics who excelled in my fields of interest.  If they are anything like the speeches given by those academic award winners, the speeches were prepared and ranged from the highly memorable to cringeworthly boring….and I can assure you they lasted far longer than 2 minutes.

Let’s remember that over the past 35 years the income and wealth of the top 5% of the country has risen, and everybody else has stood still or declined. In that context, anything that is perceived to give kids even the slightest edge in getting into a college that will lead to a more remunerative career (note that I’ve carefully avoided words like “better” or “successful”) is going to be fought over like water in the desert.

And as for admissions committees, these are not people with a whole lot of time, money and resources compared to the job they have to do. A junior faculty member who worked on the committee (in addition to all the other things junior faculty do to try and keep their jobs) said they divided applications into three piles: absolute acceptances, absolute rejections, and maybe-we’d-better-actually-read-this-before deciding. So yeah, just the way that lots of businesses will weed out resumes based on a single typo or a font they don’t lie, it’s no surprise that admissions people will use similar hacks to get their jobs done. But what we should really be trying to deal with is a world where not being one of the seven valedictorians probably means you’re going to live a substantially less pleasant life than your parents…

(The high school I went to used a grading system where 1 was best—and awarded maybe a few dozen times a semester schoolwide—and 5 was failing; every year they had long conversations with all the admissions people they could about this fact. And every year some poor sucker got dinged somewhere for having a 2.0 average…)

WHile I agree, there are kids who can make it in four years, there are also gt kids who could easily go right to university or needing only 2-3 years hs.

I sooooo wish this had been available to me.  After two years of regular high school, I was accepted into the (residential) magnet school I’ve described in this thread.  The school was run on a university style schedule, and the work was at the college level.  Which was perfect.  Except, of course, that it was super weird to graduate from there and then be one of the pack of Freshmen again - I was already “over” college my second semester into it, and that really affected how seriously I took my studies.  As did the level of coursework I was allowed to take: academically unchallenging, which basically taught me that there’s no point in even trying.  All of which negatively affected my performance in college. 

I really could have thrived with a situation where I was able to grandfather in somewhere around second semester of sophomore year.  In fact, most of my former classmates who chose to attend less selective state schools that allowed students to test out of introductory courses or even get college credit for high school coursework did MUCH better in college than I did - in hindsight, my choice of a semi-prestigious liberal arts school was a big mistake.

I was first faced with grade inflation when I was in university in the ‘80s. I was talking to some recently admitted kid who was rather proud of their 4.2 GPA. My first question was, “how can you get over 4 in the first place?”. When I went to high school there was nothing higher than 4.0 - it was the perfect, like the 10 in gymnastics. I found they started giving A+ rather than A, and a number over 4 for that. Grade inflation is nothing new, it’s just gotten far worse.

*Though this frustrated me at the time, because why should I waste time sucking at calculus and trashing my average, when I dislike calculus and will never use it again beyond this semester, seeing as I’ll inevitably major in the humanities?

It is another way they have to eliminate a whole swath of “less worthy candidates” from the burgeoning applicant pool so they can fill their incoming admitted class of the “most highly qualified” students. 

Since there are plenty of applicants who have completed first year calculus or more before graduating high school in the burgeoning applicant pool, they are considered “superior” to those who have not done so. 

Same reasoning for why they state they expect a minimum of 3-4 years of English, 3 years of science, etc….....a way of not only ensuring a minimum educational baseline they assume all incoming first-years can start from….but also a way of whittling down the applicant pool so only the “most highly qualified” remain to be selected into the incoming first-year class…..often those who greatly exceed those minimum requirements.

Paul, that’s a really good point.  I was musing on why I think there are so many valedictorians (I actually don’t think grade inflation and coddling are the culprits), trying to figure out WHY things are so much more competitive now than they were in my parents’ generation.  My dad was his school’s one and only valedictorian, and he went on to attend LSU (I’m from Louisiana).  Which was seen as a HUGE achievement back then.  What changed?  It’s exactly as you’ve said.

I, improbably, went to one of the top Ivies.  Improbably, because I did so so in a bad public high school, and my parents weren’t connected to anything.  But in my attempt to extract myself from my miserable background, I did some interesting things, and on a whim applied and got in with comprehensive financial aid. 

The first year was hell.  Although I was somewhat older than my class, I was in no way academically ready to think independently, in an intellectual way, about anything.  I felt like an idiot.  Things did improve, but it was rough.  I’m glad I went, but I am still a little intimidated almost by people from a background that included a competitive high school;  I don’t know how they do it.

There really are huge gaps in terms of education between the Prep schools, the rare great public schoola and the rest of us.

@Exholt

I get, as an adult, why they want the kids who got the A in every English and history and arts course the school offers and an A in Calculus.  It’s about being more well-rounded.  In a certain way of seeing it, that kid is “smarter” than I am, even though it ultimately means nothing since all students will eventually choose an area to specialize in. 

But, ooooooooh, it drove me crazy in school!

Nobel Prize speeches are formal prepared scientific lectures in which the winner describes the discovery that was the basis for awarding the Prize.

I found they started giving A+ rather than A, and a number over 4 for that. Grade inflation is nothing new, it’s just gotten far worse.

Most schools I’m familiar with don’t give extra points for a bullshit “A+”, they give extra points for taking more challenging coursework.  Which is not grade inflation.  If I took both AP courses offered in Spanish (“Spanish Language” and “Spanish Literature”), and got A’s in them, and took the AP exam and scored well, I damn well better get some credit for all that.  I deserve that, it’s not inflation or coddling or “everybody gets a trophy”.  It’s years worth of additional work that other students did not do, and qualifications that other students do not have.

phylosopher, I was referring to guidance counselors, who at many schools are really not that useful, but the students are competing with other applicants whose guidance counselors know the lay of the land and have seen hundreds of applications to top tier schools over the course of their careers. The latter group even stake their reputation on their ability to have a track record of students who were admitted to top colleges so will be more interested in guiding them in that direction if they think they can get in.

I was already “over” college my second semester into it, and that really affected how seriously I took my studies.  As did the level of coursework I was allowed to take: academically unchallenging, which basically taught me that there’s no point in even trying.  All of which negatively affected my performance in college.

Several high school classmates felt that way when they entered the CUNY and SUNY honors programs because they were “underachievers” like myself and money. 

Within a year, they all “transferred up” to schools like Reed, Brown, Columbia, Georgetown, etc where they were free to take as many advanced and even graduate-level classes as they felt ready for after a short discussion with a much more open-minded academic adviser than what they had at their previous institutions.  And most of them managed to do so with full or near-full scholarship funding. 

One thing I was grateful for was to have advisers who allowed me to take advanced courses even without having taken the prerequisites after I’ve demonstrated my readiness by discussing the readings I’ve done outside of class and pertinent personal experiences related to the prerequisite courses/field.

Wow, my post at #69 sounds so fucking Tracey Flick, doesn’t it?

The latter group even stake their reputation on their ability to have a track record of students who were admitted to top colleges so will be more interested in guiding them in that direction if they think they can get in.

With some going way too far like that 95 average classmate from a previous graduating class who was barred by my guidance counselor from applying to Boston College because it was “far too low-level for a student of your caliber” despite the fact he had his heart set on going there because he was an Eagles football fan. 

What’s more sad was there was no need for that BS considering how many people from each of our graduating classes end up getting admitted and attending Ivy/Ivy-level schools….even HYP/MIT/Caltech/Carnegie Mellon.  In the greater scheme of things….one less person gaining admission and going to such institutions is not going to hurt our high school’s reputation or his own. 

With some going way too far like that 95 average classmate from a previous graduating class who was barred by my guidance counselor from applying to Boston College because it was “far too low-level for a student of your caliber” despite the fact he had his heart set on going there because he was an Eagles football fan.

exiwenttoanurbanmagnetschoolholt, in that case the students guidance counselor was engaging in a proper intervention where his parents obviously wouldn’t/couldn’t. Seriously, I like BC and all, but at the achievement level of your classmate: safety school. If you have some compulsion to study with the Jesuits, at least go to Georgetown.

Plus, seriously, if he’d gone there, we’d never hear the end of it regarding how much smarter he was than all of his private school educated classmates, not realizing that the more qualified ones were likely to make the correct decision to go to a more prestigious school if they had the ability to get accepted.

Opo, it is and has been available.  The problem is that very few people will ell students.  I found out out of desperate boredom..  It is becoming fairly common with academic homeschooler

Traditional?  You want traditional?  My mother had the highest GPA in her high school in 1959 and was NOT valedictorian or salutatorian.  Neither was the highest scoring male, whose name was something like Jimmy Nakamura.  Those honors went to the second and third highest scoring males who were white and also played sports.

My son’s friends mom’s father graduated from that same high school about a decade earlier and was also not the valedictorian despite having the highest GPA - all because he played jazz in nightclubs rather than playing sports.

The traditional honors went to popular, high GPA white males, apparently.

If it’s the difference between getting into Harvard or not, downgrading someone because of sliver thin differences doesn’t quite seem fair.  This seems like a better solution.

I’m really surprised that Amanda would say this. Whether upper middle class kids get into Harvard or have to settle and go to Princeton instead is not a particuarly compelling thing. Too many upper middle class kids are disproportionately represented in the Harvard entering class already, and the competition among yuppie parents and their overachieving kids is unhealthy for everyone involved.

Personally, I see no reason not to abolish the valedictorian in these sorts of situations—grade inflation has killed it anyway. I certainly don’t see, however, how it is a great harm if some extremely high achieving privileged kid has to go to their safety school.

Which makes the whole “commencement speech” thing make a little more sense—it turns out the “traditional” valedictorian was just someone chosen by the adults to be a spokesman for the class.

“If it’s the difference between getting into Harvard or not, downgrading someone because of sliver thin differences doesn’t quite seem fair.  This seems like a better solution. “

It’s not like Harvard accepts every student with “valedictorian” slapped on their application—someone ends up not getting into Harvard. When one school is handing out valedictorian like free condoms at a Planned Parenthood clinic and another school is treating it like it means something, it’s the students going to the school doing the right thing who end up suffering in comparison—sure, they got better grades taking harder classes than valedictorian #17 at the first school, but they didn’t get the label. That’s the problem.

Opoponax, I was lucky enough to go to a very good public HS that offered tons of AP classes, and I wound up entering college as a junior. It was great because not only was I always the single first person to register for classes, so I got all the good classes on the right day and time, but because I could then take four years to finish my degree while still taking art classes and all kinds of other interesting stuff. This was 1986-90, though, so it might be different today.

The second-tier research university where I now teach just last year unveiled that we were going to start treating 98+% averages as A+ and give out 4.2 instead of 4.0. I teach a notoriously difficult subject and nobody ever does that well. So my students get A minuses or maybe once in awhile a straight A, and students who take joke courses wind up with higher GPAs. It’s stupid, really: they ought to weight it by degree of difficulty, but try getting the sociology and psychology departments to go along with THAT.

Felagund - Some of my high school friends were able to do that sort of thing.  They were able to take exams held by their universities which awarded credit, enabling them to graduate sooner.  This was at LSU and some other state schools in the South in the late 90’s.  I, unfortunately, opted to go to a fancy schmancy school that allowed nothing of the sort.  In hindsight, that was actually a stupid thing to do.  But how was I to know that I’d hate college and want to ram through?

The school I went to did not award credit for AP scores, just to clarify.  The schools my friends went to may or may not have, but you could also take these other exams.

Opoponax, I was lucky enough to go to a very good public HS that offered tons of AP classes, and I wound up entering college as a junior. It was great because not only was I always the single first person to register for classes, so I got all the good classes on the right day and time, but because I could then take four years to finish my degree while still taking art classes and all kinds of other interesting stuff. This was 1986-90, though, so it might be different today.

Being able to enter as a junior with AP credits at an Ivy-level institution like UMich is much more difficult now than back in your time, if not impossible.  From looking at their website, it seems it only counts towards intro and some distribution requirements…and with a few exceptions…you need to score a 4 or better to get any credits.  Looks like the requirements are similar to that of my undergrad during my time there, except they almost never granted AP credit for any score lower than 4 or a 5. 

Moreover, there is an increasing perception among many Ivy/Ivy-level faculty that it is “too easy” to get AP credit, even with a 4-5 and the AP tests/classes do not go into as much depth as their own intro courses so some Ivies may refuse to grant any credits for AP exams…even with the highest score of 5 or place severe limits on how much AP credits you can apply towards your degree. 

Incidentally, the only classmate I knew who was able to start her college career as an entering junior after graduating from high school was someone who managed to finish her high school’s graduation requirements by her sophomore year and ended up taking two full years of college courses at nearby Williams College while continuing her status as a student at her public school because she did not reach the minimum age of 16 to be absolved of her town’s high school enrollment mandates.

That’s what I mean by “they don’t tell you,” exholt.  My uni just had a student graduate at 14.  But ask our local school district, and they would probably tell you that a student must complete hs to be accepted at a college - bunk! His younger brother is currently enrolled- in physics, IIRC.  I have another friend whose 14 y o daughter is in college.  Yes, they were all homeschooled.  When I did early entrance, there were quite a few 15 y o. Primarily, it is the state, not the town that sets attendance policy. Somebody probably lied to your classmate.  Lots of states are moving to what’s termed dual enrollment since AP is the biggest waste of $ out there.  Classes with 6-10 students, while great for the student, isn’t great for the taxpayer who ends up duplicating what already exists at a local Uni. It also separates students from their intellectual peers. Dual enrollees get both hs and college credit for their courses, and can participate in hs extracurriculars if they choose.

There’s some support for this in academe, including Leon Bottstein of Bard, some faculty at UC and at Harvard, as well as the various schools with early entrance programs, of course.

Phylosopher,  While I think that it is possible for some one so young to be Academically ready for university at a younger age than they are accepted, the idea that they are mature and emotionally ready is just bollocks, the social education that you receive at high school is important too.

Plus, ugh to home schooling, I’m studying to be a teacher(in Australia, as far as I can tell it’s a lot more specialised than your courses) and the idea that you know how to teach because you’re a parent bugs me a lot.

To the multiple Valedictorian issue, somebody mentioned way up there that her friend who got the same GPA as other people ended up being Valedictorian because she did more extracurricular activities, good for her, but what about those other people who had the same GPA but had to help out at their parents restaurant after school, or babysit their siblings because Mum and Dad both work late, I think if you get the grades you should get the rewards. The other problem with the single Valedictorian is that as we have discussed many times before, Science and Mathematics are seen to be more academic than english and the humanities, so if it comes down to two people with a perfect GPA and one person did Calculus or Physics then that person is more likely to get the honor that both of them deserved

Leah, these kids who are taking college courses are still living at home with their families, hanging out with their peers, and often doing extracurriculurs with their peers either in public school or the community. We aren’t talking about putting a 14 year old in the dorms with 20 year olds and saying “see ya at Xmas break.” Calm down.

And social education in high school? Really? I’m not saying that hanging out with your highschool aged peers is bad, but the actual institution of high school helping out socially with its bullshit hierarchies based on nothing? I think for many kids it is an entire waste of time.

And by the way, I have a masters in education and I homeschool. My training definitely comes in handy, but I have to say that other homeschool parents who do not have an educational background are not necessarily any less qualified than I am. They learn, study, research as they go. They do fine and their kids excel. Graduate school never taught me anything I couldn’t have discovered on my own with a little work, it just conveniently put it all in one place. Every parent is a teacher, we Teachers have a bag or two of tricks and a nice foundation in child development, sure, but don’t overflatter yourself by thinking that you are some super-duper expert god of pedagogy when you are a teacher, because that attitude will serve to make you a lousy one.

Leah Jaclyn @ 85, was it intentional that you capitalized science, mathematics, calculus, and physics, all of which are not capitalized in the English language, and did not capitalize English, which should be, since you were making a point about its relative importance? I found that amusing.

I’ve not found much else amusing about the topic. Call me pedantic, but words have meaning. Valedictorian is not, or at least should not be, synonymous with high GPA or high achiever. I’m all for descriptive as opposed to prescriptive linguistics, but see no need to give a title to someone who isn’t playing the role. As others have said, your being the valedictorian isn’t what makes Harvard accept you; everyone Harvard accepts has perfect grades at a private or top public school and plays an instrument and/or lettered in a sport and started a non-profit organization at the age of twelve.

As a former public school teacher (both middle and high), grade inflation drives me bonkers. It was always my fault if a kid failed, regardless of how lazy or unmotivated the student was, and regardless of whether he or she had any interest or aptitude for the subject. If a student got a D or E in my class, I had to answer for it to the administration. There was a great parody of No Child Left Behind: The Football Version that circulated among teachers and others. You can easily google the whole thing. My favorite bullet point is this one, which sums up the current attitude toward academics, at least among certain demographics:

All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL.

Phylosopher, While I think that it is possible for some one so young to be Academically ready for university at a younger age than they are accepted, the idea that they are mature and emotionally ready is just bollocks, the social education that you receive at high school is important too.

I must respectfully disagree. 

I don’t know about Australia, but from what I’ve heard from countless college classmates, colleagues, friends, and others who attended most mainstream US high schools, the only social education they’ve managed to receive is that unless you are an athlete or a well-off/popular person, you not considered of much importance in the social hierarchy and if you are an academic achiever, especially in STEM subjects or play music, you would be considered a nerd/geek and thus….ripe for being violently bullied by the athletes and the “popular people” and harassed and teased not only by them for being a nerd/geek, but even by the very teachers and educrats who by logic should be encouraging and praising you for those very talents rather than joining the athletes, popular people, and the larger anti-intellectual US society in their disdain for them. 

There’s also the factor that many petty-authoritarians seem to be attracted to the K-12 teaching profession because they have few other career options where they can exercise power over others and end up tyrannizing generations of high school students often for no other reason to exercise their powerlust and the need for cheap thrills they cannot otherwise get in their limited pathetic lives.  Although I had some fun dealing with one egregious teacher of this type, generations of students had to suffer his tyranny…..including a disabled student who he tried to deny extra test time to even though it was that student’s right as MANDATED BY STATE EDUCATION LAW. 

Even if we ignored the toxic social environment at most mainstream US high schools, especially for those to excel academically…..there’s also the factor that the teaching is often tailored to the worst students which usually results in the brightest students being extremely underwhelmed and bored out of their minds and the average students not getting as much out of the classes as they could have or worse…being fooled into believing they learned enough only to be shocked when they start their first-year in college only to find they are failing their standard or even their remedial college courses. 

And even if we’re taken out of the toxic environment that seems to be endemic at the vast majority of mainstream US high schools judging by the traumatic accounts of most college classmates, colleagues, and MSM reports and placed in an academically oriented high school like the one I attended, you get other forms of vicious jockying for status and power along with excessive drama of excessively obsessive high school kids lacking perspective like one classmate from a previous graduating class who cried like the sky has fallen because in her last semester of high school, she has received one 95 in a sea of 99s/100….and this was despite the fact she had already received Early Decision admission to Harvard or another classmate who had stomach ulcers at 14 because he was already stressing about not being able to make valedictorian by the time he graduated despite also earning nothing but 99s. 

I don’t know about you….but I don’t find much value in what high schools can offer in the way of “social education” considering all of that.  Personally, I found undergrad far more socially educational….and a few classmates who started college at 13 with whom I had some classes with felt the same.

really wish that people who get into “Ivy League” colleges realize that they were, when it all comes down to it, LUCKY.  Yeah, you’re qualified- so were hundreds (thousands?) of other students who were turned away.

Oh, this - time one million.  I went to Cambridge University (UK) with one other person from my school.  There were also two others who had applied - one was accepted but didn’t get the grades they needed, one was rejected but got the grades that would have got them in if they had been accepted.  There wasn’t anything really between the four of us except luck.

Luck.  Luckity-luck.  Whether the person looking at your application form is in a good mood that day.  Whether they like your name.  Whether the interviewer(s) got out of the wrong side of bed that morning.  Or just plain liked you, or didn’t.  For me, I was asked a question in my first interview to which I knew the answer because I’d been listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 that morning - so the difference between me going to Cambridge or not may well have been down to Brian Redhead.

I can’t speak for the American experience, but given that the numbers are even bigger I can’t imagine it’s much different.

Naomi, there’s a whole bunch of space on the continuum between “you suck” and no one can ever, ever, ever, get any reward for being/doing the least little bit better than anyone else because someone’s feelings will get hurt. 

Yeah, this is true.  And recognizing everyone who got a 4.0 rather than bending over backward to decide that one of them is better than alllll the other top students is well inside that space!

Regarding public vs. private, I went to an elite liberal arts college from a public high school and was well prepared, though it was still a shock to suddenly no longer ever be the smartest person in the room.  I had a few friends who’d been to elite prep schools; their grades were not any higher than mine.  The one place I really saw a difference was the young woman from a small town in Texas, whose math preparation was really inadequate and who decided not to take any math in college.  Most of my classmates came from public high schools.  My friend who graduated summa cum laude from college (which is to say, he got one B+, and everything else was in A-range) came from a really crap small-town public school system. 

There are absolutely inequities that perpetuate themselves, but I’m seeing some really weird assumptions here about what admissions offices are looking for.

(derail) I’m a parent of a high schooler with questions about college applications. My kiddo just completed her junior year of high school. She’s interested in engineering, said so on her PSAT, scored really well, and just got a “please apply, here’s all the paperwork you’ll need” from Harvard. We’re in BF Eastern Washington, she’s going to a local Jesuit high school, we’re middle class… just how stoked should I be? (Dang near had a nerdgasm when she got mail from MIT.) Is an Ivy league school within reason for us? I went to the local state university and did okay… should I sell a kidney to get my kid this chance? (/derail)

But ask our local school district, and they would probably tell you that a student must complete hs to be accepted at a college - bunk!

While you don’t have to have a high school diploma to be accepted at a college, most competitive universities have entrance requirements that basically amount to the same.  You need to be able to demonstrate 3+ years of high school level math, science, English, and usually social studies and foreign language as well. 

While I suppose it’s possible that 13 and 14 year old home schooled students can demonstrate that, if I were a university admissions counselor I would look very suspiciously on such claims*.  Mainly since 13 and 14 year olds are unlikely to have done any high school level work at all.  Even if being homeschooled enables you to work to your full potential at a much younger age, and if you cut out all the other stuff high schools make you study that isn’t necessarily part of universities’ required curriculum, I don’t really see how you’d legitimately fit 3 or more years of real academic work in those subjects into the space of a year or so. 

Of course, one could always try to gain admission into a university with less stringent requirements.  Which may or may not be a good idea, depending on whether the student in question really is ready for college level work or not.  It seems a shame to rush into college just because your parents were able to convince some overworked admissions person that you’d managed to cram 3 years of math into 6 months.

Ab-Normal, I don’t mean to crush your spirit, but all it means is that Harvard purchased a mailing list of kids who got above such-and-such on either the SAT or the ACT, and your kid’s name is on it.  It’s not a personal invitation.  It’s just targeted junk mail, the same way the BMW dealership in your town buys a mailing list of people who have a home worth of over $XXX.

I am surprised at the naivete of some on here.  I’m currently shepherding two kids through the elite college admissions process.  Valedictorian is not “what makes the difference between getting into Harvard or not.”  And some of you are waaaaay overstating the importance of the Andovers and Philips Exeters to the elite schools.  Really, these schools are not “afraid” of enrolling Joe Schmoe from Average-Schmoe Public School.  It’s just that they can only seat so many kids.

Ab_Normal - if there is any chance that she would really be able to go if she got in, and she wants to apply, and y’all can handle all the hoops and hurdles of the application process, then sure, why not? 

One of my big regrets about the college app process was that it didn’t even occur to me that I could apply to anything like an Ivy league school, that I might stand even a slight chance of getting in.  I now know people as an adult who weren’t necessarily all that much more impressive than me who did get into very prestigious universities - it’s entirely possible that by some fluke I could have got in, too.  You definitely won’t get in if you don’t try.

Susanne - granted this is a few years ago (late 90’s/early 2000’s), but an ex of mine attended Harvard and didn’t do a lot of the “elite college admissions” system-gaming.  He’s not unusually genius-ified, either, and does not have wealthy parents.  Didn’t get a 1600 on his SAT.  Didn’t go to a particularly elite high school.  Didn’t do some insane exceptional thing like circumnavigate the globe via sailboat.  Based on his intellect and discipline as a 20-something, I would doubt that he was a straight A student in high school (or that he entirely deserved those grades if he did get them). 

To hear him talk - and I’m sure there’s some humility here - the difference for him was that he had a high school guidance counselor who encouraged smart kids to reach for that sort of thing.  The rest was all luck.

(derail) I’m a parent of a high schooler with questions about college applications. My kiddo just completed her junior year of high school. She’s interested in engineering, said so on her PSAT, scored really well, and just got a “please apply, here’s all the paperwork you’ll need” from Harvard. We’re in BF Eastern Washington, she’s going to a local Jesuit high school, we’re middle class… just how stoked should I be? (Dang near had a nerdgasm when she got mail from MIT.) Is an Ivy league school within reason for us? I went to the local state university and did okay… should I sell a kidney to get my kid this chance? (/derail)

If she’s strongly interested in engineering as a field of study, Harvard is not exactly the best place for it as the Division of Applied Sciences where Engineering departments are based tends to be regarded on the campus as a neglected stepchild to the dominant Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  The only high school classmates I knew who went there were either ones who were turned down by Ivy/Ivy-level schools with stronger engineering programs or went mainly for the “Harvard” name rather than the engineering programs. 

Most of my engineering-oriented classmates who did apply to Ivies bypassed Harvard because there was a widespread perception that it did not prioritize engineering nearly as much as the other fields.  Their top Ivy picks tended to be Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, UPenn, and Dartmouth….though they’d prefer schools like MIT, Caltech, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, etc. 

Also, considering where you’re located UWashington-Seattle…if their engineering programs are anything like their Computer Science department….that’s also a great bet and unlike some of the choices I mentioned above….they also have strong programs in the natural sciences and the humanities/social sciences.  However, they seem to be quite bureaucratic and there might be concerns students may need 5 or more years because they may not be able to register to take all the required classes they need to graduate in 4-5 years according to some colleagues who graduated from there. 

As for whether you should be stoked, that’s up to you….but I’d be damned stoked and proud of her and would do whatever it took to allow her to go to her first choice school…even if it is an expensive private school like MIT or Harvard. 

Then again, I came from a family background and went to an urban public magnet high school filled with working/middle class parents who would be the types to heavily sacrifice themselves financially so their children can attend the Ivy/Ivy-level schools like MIT….provided their children are making the grade and not flunking classes.  Of course, I understand YMMV on that front.

My understanding of the Harvard thing is that, if you’re a more “well-rounded” type of student who maybe doesn’t know precisely what you want to major in, especially if you’re multi-talented and could have your pick of either Biology or Poli-Sci, it’s a good place to be.  If you know from the age of 15 that you want to specifically study Engineering, and not Psychology or Economics or Math, it’s probably not the place for you.

Speaking of Harvard, and getting in to prestigious schools, and overall intelligence type stuff.

When I was a freshman at Emerson (not at all considered an elite institution), I tested into an advanced English class.  We were thrown Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, etc. from the first day.  At 18.  Having never seen anything like Critical Theory before.  Looking back, it was the only difficult course I ever had in college.  When I transferred to Hunter (a public school, part of the CUNY system), I ran into those same theories over and over again.  It seemed to me to be the basic backbone of what you need to be familiar with to do coursework in the humanities at the university level.

My ex, who went to Harvard?  I’m not sure he ever saw that stuff.  And definitely not on the first day.  Still has trouble understanding basic concepts relating to that world.  I remember forwarding him interesting blog posts about gender and semiotics during our relationship and him just being like “buh? whuh?”  Not refuting the feminist angle; not even being able to do that because he doesn’t understand what the article is saying.

None of this is to knock Harvard, of course.  It just occurs to me that A) a college education is what you make of it, and B) sometimes a name is just a name.

When I was a freshman at Emerson (not at all considered an elite institution), I tested into an advanced English class.  We were thrown Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, etc. from the first day.  At 18.  Having never seen anything like Critical Theory before.  Looking back, it was the only difficult course I ever had in college.  When I transferred to Hunter (a public school, part of the CUNY system), I ran into those same theories over and over again.  It seemed to me to be the basic backbone of what you need to be familiar with to do coursework in the humanities at the university level.

Depends on his major and academic interests. 

Most of those names tend to be covered much more if one happened to be a literature or a philosophy major or a related field and less so if one happened to major in other fields such as history or especially political science.  Heck, I know for a fact that most poli-sci majors would have missed most or even all of those listed authors if they weren’t interested in philosophical/literary theory beyond the intro courses needed to fulfill distribution requirements. 

Even within a field like history where literary theorists like some of the names you mentioned above are cited, it is not widely used in most colleges until the undergrad reached his/her last 2 years of undergrad…..if he/she is even interested in pursuing such theories as they may apply to his/her field.
Moreover, even if so inclined, most people do not really seem to really delve into such theorists until they start grad school in the humanities and the social sciences. 

Speaking for myself, the main theorists I’ve studied in my undergrad were political-oriented or specific to my area of history such as Weber, Confucius, Gramsci, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and to some extent….Deng.  I’ve also done quite a bit of reading in the history and development of Imperialist/Fascist/militarist movements, especially those pertaining to Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries.

Agg…forgot to add:

So, should I call someone who only cursorily glanced or worse, did not read any of the above-listed political theorists as not being “well-educated”? I’m not so sure about that….especially if the theorists concerned are not considered as important in their field of study or worse, considered completely irrelevant as would be the case with many mainstream literature sub-fields, some history/poli-sci subfields (*COUGH* American Studies *COUGH*), mainstream economics, or any natural or technical science field.

Heck, I know for a fact that most poli-sci majors would have missed most or even all of those listed authors if they weren’t interested in philosophical/literary theory beyond the intro courses needed to fulfill distribution requirements. 

This was very much not the case at Hunter.  I remember sitting around with my Women’s Studies friends talking about structuralism vs. post-structuralism.  Shit, I remember sociolinguistics courses where the entire syllabus hinged on Judith Butler. 

Ah, those were the days…

To clarify, I’m not suggesting that anyone who doesn’t have a familiarity with Foucault isn’t well-educated.  It’s just interesting to me that I have a B.A. in a liberal artsy area (anthropology) from a middling public university, this friend of mine has a B.A. in a liberal artsy area (psychology) from what is supposedly The Absolute Bestest University In The Americas, and yet I can run intellectual circles around him in terms of these very high-falutin’ academic approaches he somehow never came into contact with.

I went to a public school - not a magnet school, but one in an affluent part of Southern California (though not the one known for its academics, that parents would pull strings to get their kids admitted to even though they lived out of area).  Out west, there aren’t many private schools except for Catholic schools, and they’re not notably different in academic quality.  My understanding is that, in other parts of the U.S., private schools and magnet programs pull resources and students away from the public schools in a way that didn’t happen to me.

I wasn’t valedictorian; I had over a 4.0 thanks to bonuses for honors/AP classes, but I had a few Bs on my transcript, and to be valedictorian out of my class of 500+ you had to not only get straight As, but juggle your schedule to take as many honors and AP courses as possible.  (The guy who got it my year, if I remember right, retook European History when they changed it to an AP course our senior year, giving him one more “bonus point” than the next guy.)  On the other hand, I remember the transcript including class rank in an “X out of Y” format, and I was somewhere in the teens, so the effect of that was mitigated.

Among my classmates at Brown, a few schools were very overrepresented, all of which were private or magnet schools on the East Coast: Andover, Exeter, Sidwell Friends, Montgomery Blair, Stuyvesant.  (My school sent a few kids to Stanford, but nowhere near the proportion of these schools to Brown; most went to one of the UC schools.)  I didn’t notice any increased academic preparedness on the part of these students, except that the Computer Science department had a “sink or swim” introductory class that strongly favored those people who had already taken programming classes (which in 1995 weren’t offered at many schools) or managed to pick it up on their own.  In something like English, it really didn’t make much of a different; in fact, the “feeder school” kids tended to be more mediocre, possibly because they weren’t exceptional students; they were often just “pretty good” students who’d gone to the right high schools.

This was very much not the case at Hunter.  I remember sitting around with my Women’s Studies friends talking about structuralism vs. post-structuralism.  Shit, I remember sociolinguistics courses where the entire syllabus hinged on Judith Butler.

Ah, those were the days…

I should also add that there are still many older faculty members in two of my fields of history and poli-sci who look upon Critical Theory and fields such as Women’s Studies with much dismissiveness and disdain.  Still encounter a few who see them little more than “Marxist indoctrination programs” which pisses me off, especially considering the fact that I actually studied Marxist Theory in some depth and they are talking out of their asses. 

Incidentally, the only reasons why I had any exposure to some of your listed authors was from taking an intro philosophy course and several lit courses to fulfill distribution requirements and also to round out my East Asian studies minor. 

As for psychology, it can be a liberal artsy major or it can be heavily sciency depending on the subfield concentration and the courses taken based on his level of interests.  Several psych major friends and colleagues concentrated on the sciency concentrations and practically ignored as much of the “liberal artsy aspects as their programs allowed them to get away with.

Thanks, all. Thought as much about Harvard. UW is going to be her “safety school”. But right now her primary consideration appears to be distance from home—as in, the greater, the better. Can’t blame her, I hate Spokane too, sometimes…

Thanks, all. Thought as much about Harvard. UW is going to be her “safety school”. But right now her primary consideration appears to be distance from home—as in, the greater, the better. Can’t blame her, I hate Spokane too, sometimes…

I should also mention UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, Harvey Mudd, Northwestern, University of Illinois-Urbana, URochester, Case-Western, UMichigan-Ann Arbor, UT-Austin, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, etc.

In something like English, it really didn’t make much of a different; in fact, the “feeder school” kids tended to be more mediocre, possibly because they weren’t exceptional students; they were often just “pretty good” students who’d gone to the right high schools.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by mediocre? If you meant quality of class participation or demonstrated interest as several lit professors I’ve had did, there’s a very good explanation for that for Bx Science or Stuyvesant graduates. 

Most tend to be extremely obsessively focused on STEM fields and unfortunately…quite anti-intellectual regarding humanities courses like English or social science courses like political science. 

It also didn’t help that while nearly all of the ones I knew can write decently enough to view such courses as “East As”, they hated it as they felt it was “wasted” time taken away from their “true priorities”....their STEM courses.  Though I can get along with them because of my strong interest in computers and technology, I tended to mostly hang out with the minority of high school classmates who were not anti-intellectual about the humanities and social science fields.

Exholt, he’s definitely on the liberal artsy end of things.  He’s a journalist, nowadays, and never had any notion of going into the clinical or experimental (or even counseling) aspects of psychology. 

In fact, he’s part of why my understanding of Harvard is that it’s structured for well-rounded students who maybe don’t know exactly what their calling in life is—I’m pretty sure he majored in that as a fluke, as he did journalism internships during college and got a beat reporting gig immediately on graduating.  Harvard doesn’t have a journalism school, so his approach was just to major in whatever caught his fancy in the moment and then become a journalist after graduation. 

And he seems to be somewhat typical in that regard, at least amongst friends of his from school that I’ve met.  None of them are people who have a special drive or passion that they’ve been specifically working towards since they were 12, or anything like that.  They’re very intelligent people who went to college, took some classes, realized their interests lay in Area X, and either used that or didn’t use that later on.

Most tend to be extremely obsessively focused on STEM fields and unfortunately…quite anti-intellectual regarding humanities courses like English or social science courses like political science. 

I don’t know a lot about the curricula in the Ivies, but how much humanities does your average STEM student have to take?  As a humanities person, I was required by my mediocre state school to take two science courses - only one of which had to include a lab - and one math course (which could be the most ridiculously easy math-lite course, evar).  And I probably could have gotten out of the math if I was desperate to avoid it.

Because my major occasionally tends towards the sciencey, I also had to take a couple of science courses within my department.  But those fell easily within my subject area and didn’t seem like too much of a chore - just not really my exact cup of tea.

In fact, he’s part of why my understanding of Harvard is that it’s structured for well-rounded students who maybe don’t know exactly what their calling in life is—I’m pretty sure he majored in that as a fluke, as he did journalism internships during college and got a beat reporting gig immediately on graduating.  Harvard doesn’t have a journalism school, so his approach was just to major in whatever caught his fancy in the moment and then become a journalist after graduation.

Not to deny your ex’s experiences, but that’s very weird as the Harvard undergrads I encountered tended to be extremely focused and knew what they wanted to do from the moment they first entered the campus or in the case of some high school classmates, since they were 12-14 year old first-years. 

Of course, that focus tends to be overwhelmingly pre-professional….a reason why high school friends who attended Ivies like Harvard perceived a great deal of anti-intellectualism from their fellow Ivy-classmates….including most of their fellow high school classmates-cum-now Ivy classmates and bitterly ranted about it.

I should also mention UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, Harvey Mudd, Northwestern, University of Illinois-Urbana, URochester, Case-Western, UMichigan-Ann Arbor, UT-Austin, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, etc.

I think the sprog has received letters from most of those…

@Ab_Normal: She thinking about any California schools? Stanford, etc? They’re not very far from home but they’re not Spokane, either (of course, neither is Seattle. :p)

I don’t know a lot about the curricula in the Ivies, but how much humanities does your average STEM student have to take?  As a humanities person, I was required by my mediocre state school to take two science courses - only one of which had to include a lab - and one math course (which could be the most ridiculously easy math-lite course, evar).  And I probably could have gotten out of the math if I was desperate to avoid it.

From chatting with friends and from glancing at a few undergrad course bulletins from such schools when I was helping some neighbors’ kids through the college applications process, science majors actually need to take more humanities and social science classes to fulfill their distribution requirements than their liberal arts counterparts. 

This is especially the case with schools with a “Core Curriculum” like Columbia or UChicago though most STEM majors end up getting around that by using the wide selection of courses available to opt for those closely tied with science and technology and/or taking courses which are known to have ridiculously lax reading/writing requirements (Anything less than 100-150 pages/week and 2 or less papers no longer than 5-8 pages).....the humanities/social science equivalent of “rocks for jocks” type courses.

agg….I meant more than their liberal arts counterparts need to take math/science courses to fulfill their distribution requirements.

@exholt - oh, he knew what he wanted to do, in a “with your life” kind of sense (journalism), he just didn’t have the kind of all-consuming passion from a very young age that tends to send people to places like Caltech or RISD.  And you don’t need a degree in journalism to be a journalist.  So he went for the classic liberal arts experience (and, I would assume, the connections and opportunities that Harvard entitles one to).  Which I think is a really noble and worthy educational choice.  There’s nothing wrong with not knowing from the age of 10 that you are destined to be a physics professor. 

And, agreed, there are LOTS of people who go to places like Harvard knowing they eventually want to go to law, business, or medical school.  But that’s not really specialized in the way that knowing from middle school that you want to be a painter or an engineer and thus the liberal arts curriculum is going to be pointless for you.  The people who know they want to be lawyers simply have a slight head start on the people who decide they want to be lawyers.

I don’t know a lot about the curricula in the Ivies, but how much humanities does your average STEM student have to take?

I dunno about Ivies, but my SLAC required 2 classes in the humanities, 2 in the social sciences*, 2 years of language (you could test out of this) and 2 math/science courses. And then a bunch of electives of whatever type. Arguably the STEM students were more well-rounded than the other students, because most of the electives weren’t particularly STEM-ish, so we’d end up taking lots of non-math-‘n-science classes just to fill up our schedules. I took 2 gender-studies classes, a year of intro Japanese (that class kicked my ASS), Japanese history and a class about the history of the Atlantic. My humanities friends took… intro psychology** and intro physics. And we always had to talk about humanities-type stuff if we were gonna talk school, ‘cause they couldn’t tell you what mitochondria do to save their lives but I’d at least heard the name Butler. :p

We were also way busier, classroom-time-wise; a humanities class that met for 3 hours a week total was the same number of credits as a chemistry class that met 3 hours a week + 1 hour mandatory review session + 3-4 hrs lab per week. (They did more reading outside of class, generally, but the overall amount of work was similar enough between us that I can’t say one way or another if anyone worked harder. And I don’t wanna derail thaaaat much…)

But my school was kinda unusual, and I went there for some of these reasons—I wanted to be a well-rounded STEM person. So I don’t know how widely you can generalize from that. It’s certainly possible to get a degree in science and be the shittiest writer that ever shitted on paper. :D

*I don’t count these as STEM… are they generally thought of as STEM by others?

**EASIEST class ever. I showed up to class, did nothing to study, and then got perfect scores on the tests basically because I know what the scientific method is.

*I don’t count these as STEM… are they generally thought of as STEM by others?

Not by anyone except social scientists with a serious inferiority complex in relation to their STEM counterparts.  Yes….I’m especially talking about your average Economists and Political scientists….especially the ones in the Chicago School and the Rational Choice Obsessives. 

This complex is one reason so many of my STEM major classmates tend to roll their eyes and disdainfully scorn attempts by social scientists to call themselves “scientists”. 

Even some friends who study Econ and poli-sci at the PhD level tend to be quite skeptical of the “sciencyness” of their fields.

Yeah.  It kind of depends where you fall in the world of the social sciences, but as an anthro major who concentrated mainly on ethnography, archaeology, and linguistics*, I certainly didn’t consider myself having much in common with my old friends from HS who went off to engineering schools.  On the other hand, I had friends in the anthropology department who did physical anthropology and later went on to do much more hard science things with their lives.  Like medical school or PhD’s in paleontology. 

*Though some aspects of linguistics have a hard-science sheen to them, it often presents with symptoms close to what exholt mentions about the Chicago School types.  I love Chomskian syntax as much as the next girl, but at the end of the day you have to take a step back and remember that it ain’t physics.

I want to say one more thing, before this thread completely dies.

In the end, I’m not sure all this stuff matters very much.

I didn’t try as hard as I could in high school.  Didn’t challenge myself enough in areas that were outside my direct line of interest.  Didn’t think outside the box about options that might have been available to me.  I made a lot of mistakes in the college application process, not to mention the HUGE honking mistakes I made once I was actually in college.  I am the poster child for ruined potential. 

But.

Somehow, I’ve cobbled together a life for myself doing things I enjoy.  I don’t make a ton of money, but I get by (and I’m not sure an Ivy league education would have changed that).  I live in an amazing city.  I’ve traveled all over the world.  I’m fairly happy.  The bottom line for most people is that it just doesn’t matter that much whether you went to Harvard or LSU.  It certainly doesn’t matter enough to lose sleep or make yourself miserable.

Somehow, I’ve cobbled together a life for myself doing things I enjoy.  I don’t make a ton of money, but I get by (and I’m not sure an Ivy league education would have changed that).  I live in an amazing city.  I’ve traveled all over the world.  I’m fairly happy.

You’re far more fortunate than most people in this world.  Bravo!

Going back to the OP topic, has there been any high school valedictorian who has been memorable even a few months after graduation? Did anyone really care beyond the valedictorians themselves?

Any memories of valedictorians who actually used their opportunity to speak to challenge, criticize, or otherwise facilitate antics and pranks by fellow classmates which entertained the graduating class at the expense of TPTB? Just curious.

In my school (and my sister’s, tho they’re different schools) the valedictorian was just the patsy elected to make all the boring speeches.

My school’s valedictorian went to Stanford and had a nervous breakdown.

I am surprised at the naivete of some on here. 
Comment #94: Susanne on 06/28 at 11:16 AM

I’m not.  I did well in high school, did very well in college, could have handled a way heavier load, but had no clue about admissions or anything else.  I went to the nearby State school. 

My guidance counselor was totally useless.  For example, I didn’t take the PSAT because I figured who cares because I already took it in the SMSPY talent search—so I was ineligible for the scholarships you can get from these.  I took the SAT instead as a junior and killed, but got nothing out of it.

Intellectual brilliance isn’t the same as maturity or knowing how to get into a great school.  I’m glad y’all had a chance but that doesn’t mean others aren’t similarly cut out for being in the wrong circumstance.

To hear him talk - and I’m sure there’s some humility here - the difference for him was that he had a high school guidance counselor who encouraged smart kids to reach for that sort of thing.  The rest was all luck.
Comment #96: The Opoponax on 06/28 at 11:38 AM

Amen to that, and to your comment #119.  I have an interesting job, friends, relationships, intellectual curiosity and things upon which to exercise it.  Life is good.

oldfeminist, I’d say the quality of the guidance office is one of the really big advantages the kids at the prep schools have.  The guidance office will tell them which tests to take and when and can steer the students toward applying at schools beyond the local branch of the state U.

ab_normal, quit talking about selling a kidney and listen up, because this is important.  The really good schools, the schools that your daughter should be looking at, will meet her full demonstrated financial need.  Depending on your income, that will reduce the price to something between “bargain” and “well, I can swing that without selling a kidney.”  Harvard is literally free for those with an income under $60K/year, IIRC, but there are quite a lot of other schools that will give her a decent financial aid package.

I went to Carleton, which is not the first school I would suggest to a young woman who KNOWS she wants to be an engineer.  (I would suggest she look at Harvey Mudd, which my sister attended.)  Carleton’s ticket price is $50K/year, the sort of breathtaking figure that makes me reach for smelling salts; who the hell can afford that kind of money?  Here is a chart that shows you what people of approximately your income level are actually paying.  It is not cheap, but the figure for my income level is money I can at least conceive of coming up with.  And for kids coming from families with under $40K/year income, the annual cost to the parents is $428.  That’s for tuition, room, board, and fees.  They expect students to take out $2,000/year in loans, which strikes me as a reasonable amount of debt for a college education.

When you look at college websites, look for colleges who pledge to meet the full demonstrated need of every student they admit.  Those are the colleges that will not say, “oh, here, let us fix you up with $100,000 in loans!”

Opo, I completed the coursework for a PhD in social psych at the CUNY Graduate Center before deciding that I wanted to do direct work in social justice rather than academic work. I also did a concentration in Women’s Studies, or whatever Grad Center calls that. Very, very heavy on Foucault, Butler, Kristeva, deconstruction, critical theory, queer theory, standpoint theory, critique of empirical/objectivist approaches to social science, etc. A few of my cohort came from Hunter and had a very solid background in these approaches. I think the Grad Center and Hunter lean very big-Q Qualitative and make a solid case for why social science, particularly if done in the service of social justice work, can successfully utilize qualitative methods. I also have talked with folks from “better” schools who just had no clue about any of this work. It was a bit mind-boggling since I just assumed that, hey, anyone in social science should at least know who Foucault was! And, also, a bit of awkwardness when I mentioned queer theory and the person thought I was using homophobic language!

I loved being at the Grad Center, even if I ultimately got frustrated with the academe. To me, it just shows how state schools, while supposedly not offering the same quality education as the Ivies are actually quite a bit more progressive and less traditional. Had I gone to some of the “better” schools I got into, I might have ended up not thinking about gender the way I do now, for example. I might have ended up teaching multivariate analysis or survey design somewhere and that would’ve been awful!

Thanks, Naomi, that has had a restorative effect on my will to live. :D

I also have talked with folks from “better” schools who just had no clue about any of this work. It was a bit mind-boggling since I just assumed that, hey, anyone in social science should at least know who Foucault was!

Again, I’m wondering if that is because Hunter/CUNY has a strong focus in the area of Critical Theory and that in the “better schools” that area is marginalized and sectioned-off in the literature, philosophy, women’s studies, and some Area Studies Programs.  It also does not help that some Ivy social science departments such as the government and Econ departments at Harvard has conservative Profs which further marginalizes that area of study.

Thanks, Naomi, that has had a restorative effect on my will to live. :D

I attended Oberlin College with a near-full ride scholarship which made going there a better overall-value and even cheaper financially than going to the some of the state and city schools.  Though it didn’t cover everything, I did graduate debt-free with honors-level grades by working part-time as an academic tutor and a freelance computer tech and in doing so, never had to rely on my parents for any of my undergrad educational expenses. 

A large part of that was luck and the fact I attended my institution right before they did away with “need-blinds” admission.  So I second Naomi’s point to check to see the institutions meet your daughter’s full demonstrated financial need. 

Moreover, though I had no problems working part-time while taking class overloads, I would not recommend this path if she could avoid it, especially if she’s planning to do an engineering major. 

Saw some highly motivated bright classmates suffer heavily because they became overwhelmed with far too many commitments whether it was working part-time and/or taking class overloads/taking part in too many research projects/private readings/organizing/participating in student activism, etc.

Exholt at #127, it’s both those reasons. CUNY, of course has a tradition of cutting-edge social science work. Stanley Milgram headed up the program, after all. Theories that deal with dominant discourses around gender, identity, sexuality, etc. are critical of traditional social science, so these theories are a threat to the accepted order of things in psych departments. These theories mostly come out of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and literature, and are pretty much the dominant theories in these areas of study. But social psych isn’t as willing to accept the criticism of quantitative methods, partly because it has a huge inferiority complex and wants to be a “real science.” And, of course, these theories come out of progressive, feminist, and glbt communities, and the conservative profs you mention can’t handle that. Still, for someone to be in grad school for any social science and not know who Foucault is, that’s pretty shocking. It’s like a philosophy grad student not knowing who Derrida is. You don’t have to agree with the theory, but you have to know who the dominant people in your field are. So, to me, that actually means that these schools aren’t serving their students all that well.

to Lexie@ 86.  Well, not necessarily the case.  The 14 (now 15 y o) is living with one parent near the graduate campus, a few days a week. It’s commutable to home on a weekly at least basis

Another 14 y o is at a community college - and it’s a real interesting situation.  She’s a PK (preacher’s kid)  looks to be her age or younger, really.  Caucasian.  It’s a very diverse campus.  Her “buddies” reportedly are some non-traditional African Americans male students who share interest in some trendy card game.  Treat her like a little sister, the preacher parent says.

Back when I did the early entrance stint, though this was many, many years ago, we were indeed in the dorms, with no more supervision than anyone else - that included the 15 and 16 y o’s, males and females.  Floors were co-ed, rooms were not. We were initially grouped with others in the program, but this wasn’t a hard and fast rule.

But I don’t see how this was different from being forced to endure high school - most of us would report, if asked, that high school was boring torture, the other students there juvenile, and that the majority of our friends were hs were ones we made freshman year, usually seniors, so we were hanging out with college age kids anyway.   

Thanks for the homeschooling respect.  It’s mutual.  I’ve dabbled in ed classes, and found that much of it seems to be classroom management , which comes in mighty handy with a room of 25 (or as in some states recently, 35 (I can’t imagine) students. Totally different in one on one or two home situations.  We love the flexibility - if something doesn’t work, change it up, instead of being locked into textbook contracts, etc..

While I suppose it’s possible that 13 and 14 year old home schooled students can demonstrate that, if I were a university admissions counselor I would look very suspiciously on such claims*.  Mainly since 13 and 14 year olds are unlikely to have done any high school level work at all.  Even if being homeschooled enables you to work to your full potential at a much younger age, and if you cut out all the other stuff high schools make you study that isn’t necessarily part of universities’ required curriculum, I don’t really see how you’d legitimately fit 3 or more years of real academic work in those subjects into the space of a year or so.

Of course, one could always try to gain admission into a university with less stringent requirements.  Which may or may not be a good idea, depending on whether the student in question really is ready for college level work or not.  It seems a shame to rush into college just because your parents were able to convince some overworked admissions person that you’d managed to cram 3 years of math into 6 months.
Comment #93: The Opoponax on 06/28 at 11:01 AM

Wow Opo, think, please.  It’s not as if said kid waited until some arbitrary school district designated age to start high school, then tried to do it in a year or two. For homeschooled kids (or even accelerated online programs like Johns Hopkins, EPGY, or K-12, or the Davidson School)  the kids can start at most   any age and work at their own pace.  These kids learn like others eat - they really need it.  ANd they can do it earlier, given the opportunity.  And they retain it better.  Plus, there’s no huge “let everyone catch up with six weeks of review of last year” that occurs in most grade schools.  THat’s a real timewaster that these kids don’t need.

And for the above programs, it isn’t the parents, it’s an impartial teacher grading your work.  SO take the insult and…

The really good schools, the schools that your daughter should be looking at, will meet her full demonstrated financial need.

Yeah, it’s definitely not linear. As you go up the “quality” scale (from state—> Ivy, I guess?) the cost to the family seems to shoot up until it maxes out at small-liberal-arts-but-not-Ivy (my school) and then drops way off when you actually get to the really prestigious, big-name or Ivy schools (my little sister’s school.)

Like I said upthread, my little sister is getting out of her college with no debt and I’m getting out with tons*, even though our parents have basically treated us equally, we’ve basically worked similar amounts summers and during the year (I maybe worked a little more) and her school costs about $10,000 per year more than mine on paper.

*and not to be callous about it, but if you want to make your daughter take loans and pay them herself later it’s not necessarily a big deal. I went straight into a grad program with a stipend and I’ll be paying off my interest-free-until-I-graduate loans more or less at my leisure for the next 5 years. I’ll be on the poor side but it shouldn’t impact my future too horribly.

Plus, there’s no huge “let everyone catch up with six weeks of review of last year” that occurs in most grade schools.  THat’s a real timewaster that these kids don’t need.

Man, that’s a timewaster no one needs. Even as a kid I would have been totally down with spreading the vast summer break out into littler chunks throughout the year—there’s no way you need a solid 3 months of complete nothing a year.

And it’s not complete nothing for everyone… apparently there’s a big correlation (totally forget where I read this) between parental income and how much a kid gets set back during the summer, with poorer kids getting screwed* and forgetting a lot and rich kids learning a bit and getting even more of an academic boost. Ditching that insanely long lull would even that disparity out a bit, too.

*shocking I know.

Except, Bagelsan, I think there are still schools that don’t have AC or districts too poor to pay it, where mild winter weather cuts HVAC costs. 

Whoa there on the nixxing the long lull.  I’m not sure how a lot of those accelerated and/or summer programs would fare if we didn’t have a long lull with a critical mass of kids to take them.  Even though my kids are homeschooled, we do the cool summer programs they want - theater, space camp, Latin camp a sports camp,  And these aren’t huge pricey ones or the all summer ones, just a week here and there at a reasonable (which would be on the low end of affordable for a lot of folks,) to our family, cost.  There are the hugely $$ university sleep away camps that range into the thousands for a couple weeks (math, language, aerospace, forensics, band, etc. )  NO mystery there why lots of kids do better if they have $$..

Still, for someone to be in grad school for any social science and not know who Foucault is, that’s pretty shocking. It’s like a philosophy grad student not knowing who Derrida is.

Elena,

Would you include undergrads who majored in the social science fields of history*, poli-sci, econ?

* I personally believe it can be both a humanities and a social science field depending your emphasis and approach.

@87, The fact that I will not be a pedagogical giant the second that I step out of Uni, Diplomas in hand is not lost on me, I actually think that for home schoolers subject content knowledge matters more, and that makes up 3/4 of my course load. With that I can teach two subjects from year 8-10 and about 5 specialised subjects in year 11-12, to think that you have the same knowledge base as a teacher in every subject seems a little unwise to me.

A little disclaimer though, I went to high school in Australia, the maximum class size allowed is 35, and people get annoyed about that, my year had about 200 students at graduation, and the Dux which is the Valedictorian equivalent was the person who got the highest TER so my experience in schooling is likely very different than yours.

And these aren’t huge pricey ones or the all summer ones, just a week here and there at a reasonable (which would be on the low end of affordable for a lot of folks,) to our family, cost.

If they’re a week long, why do you need 3 months off?

Exholt, not sure if I would include undergrads in general. It would be nice if universities taught both the dominant discourses and the critiques of those discourses at the undergrad level. But, unfortunately, universities see themselves as providing “useful” degrees, not well-rounded education (see all schools that have eliminated some humanities recently). It’s funny, because those in career counseling field will tell you that employers actually think that those business degrees are utterly useless and would rather have entry-level employees that can write well and think critically. And I firmly believe that actually comes out if a solid liberal arts and humanities training.

But I think that if you are a grad student in any social science or humanities field, you won’t get far without a basic familiarity with postmodernism. I’m simplifying, of course, but just like we had the age of Enlightenment and the age of modernism, when those ways of thinking about the world were dominant and definitive of their time, we are in a postmodern period now. So if you are dealing with culture or society in any way in your discipline, you sort of have to know, no?

It’s funny, because those in career counseling field will tell you that employers actually think that those business degrees are utterly useless and would rather have entry-level employees that can write well and think critically. And I firmly believe that actually comes out if a solid liberal arts and humanities training.

I think that writing and general communication skills are just huge. I went the liberal arts route for exactly that reason, even though I’ve wanted to be a scientist since before I was even clear on what a scientist did (besides possibly go into space. Microscopes may also be involved.) And it means I got a little less lab time, a little less scientific training and background… But I got a lot of critical thinking practice and a decent amount of writing as well (I flatter myself that I’m a pretty coherent writer, and my mom flatters me that I’m the best writer ever*) which have translated well into the field. During classes, when I knew an answer on a test I conveyed the shit out of that information (unlike a much more experienced classmate of mine, who had to go in after several tests to explain his answers to the professor and try to recover points on problems he had known but had answered miserably.)

Even if you’re the most brilliant scientist ever (or most brilliant businessperson, presumably) if you can’t get your thoughts outside of your head in a meaningful manner you won’t go far. And it’s tons easier to get the “learning how to think flexibly” and “learning how to write” stuff started early, and then catching up on the science after, rather than walking into a lab with fantastic skills and a complete inability to write a grant or a paper. Likewise I imagine most employers would prefer to tell someone “here’s how you do X task” or “here’s a guide for X program/process” or even “here’s the Internet, find out how X works” than have to handhold them through learning basic writing and communication/research skills.

*she’s probably objective, right?

But I think that if you are a grad student in any social science or humanities field, you won’t get far without a basic familiarity with postmodernism. I’m simplifying, of course, but just like we had the age of Enlightenment and the age of modernism, when those ways of thinking about the world were dominant and definitive of their time, we are in a postmodern period now. So if you are dealing with culture or society in any way in your discipline, you sort of have to know, no?

Though post-modernist theory is quite useful in those fields, the degree of usefulness IME seems to vary on the subfield one happens to go into.  For instance, post-modernist theory seems to be used and required more in history sub-fields involving race, class, gender, some area studies. 

On the other hand, it seems nearly all of the mainstream American Studies people I’ve come across, even at the PhD level tend to place little emphasis, disdain, or completely ignore Critical Theory/post-modernism. 

Though not as bad, there is a similar tendency among some East Asian specialists who either regard Critical Theory as only useful in some contexts, ignore it, or disdain it as “theoretical tyranny”, “intellectual navel-gazing/wanking”, or worse….another manifestation of cultural hegemony imposed by western academia on the study of non-Western societies…heard mainly from some Chinese/Taiwanese based academics.

Bagelsan, exactly! My husband works for an engineering firm and he keeps telling me about all those young engineers he works with who have MAs and PhDs, but can’t write at all. He’s always kvetching about having to re-write the technical sections of whatever proposal they are working on, because they are just not coherent writers.  There might be some scientific occupations left where someone would never have to deal with the lay community, write grants, or do presentations, but I bet that pool is shrinking.

So all those universities eliminating their humanities programs to concentrate on “real” degrees are doing their students a huge disservice. Same with universities that go for very narrow focus in curriculum and don’t require science majors to take a lot of humanities.  I bet most undergrad science degrees these days are just gateways to grad school, med school, whatever other continuing education you’d have to do for your specialty. So if someone comes out of college trying to apply to grad school or get an entry-level job and she can’t write a coherent essay or cover letter, she’s probably screwed, no matter how brilliant she is.

And mom’s are always objective. What, you mean I’m not the most brilliant person ever?

Exholt, I’ve actually heard that critique, too. It sometimes comes from post-colonialist and third-world feminists as well. I think the critique is not without merit and, really, with it’s emphasis on criticizing essentialism, post-modernism has no choice but to accept it.

Just to clarify, I don’t think everyone in humanities needs to accept critical theory/queer theory/post-modernism. I definitely had my frustrations with this work in my PhD program period. We can’t even agree if we’re really in postmodernity or not! So, I’m not saying that everyone has to embrace it, I just think that someone who is a professional thinker/teacher/producer of knowledge in these fields has to have basic familiarity with all the dominant discourses, including post-modernism.

Bagelsan, exactly! My husband works for an engineering firm and he keeps telling me about all those young engineers he works with who have MAs and PhDs, but can’t write at all. He’s always kvetching about having to re-write the technical sections of whatever proposal they are working on, because they are just not coherent writers.  There might be some scientific occupations left where someone would never have to deal with the lay community, write grants, or do presentations, but I bet that pool is shrinking.

Agree on the importance of writing and communication skills and the fact humanities and social science courses play a critical part in further refining and developing those skills. 

However, from my experience working as an academic tutor for undergraduates including classmates at my own college, the main root of this problem is the lack of adequate grammar and writing education/practice in most K-12 schools, including many private ones.  It was really telling to find most undergrad classmates and dozens of undergrads at two Ivy campuses struggling and complaining about how writing 3-5 pages was “too hard” or “too much work”. 

This was confirmed by several writing center tutors and TAs who taught writing courses who mentioned how surprised they were at the low-level of writing proficiency of most incoming first-years…even at the most elite institutions.  Considering this is a systemic issue which affects the vast majority of incoming American first-year undergrads from the angst ridden comments from Profs, friends, and articles in Chronicle of Higher Ed/Inside Higher Ed, I’m not sure how helpful introducing advanced critical theory would be in solving or even ameliorating this issue. 

In the case of STEM majors, there’s also the added hurdle that most of them are extremely pre-professional and have anti-intellectual disdain for the humanities and social sciences as they on average, tend to feel far superior in intellect to their humanities/social sciences counterparts because their majors have a greater mathematical/technical content than their non-STEM major counterparts. 

An attitude I found to be quite ironic considering how one critical reason for their academic majors was precisely to avoid dealing with writing-intensive courses as much as they can get away with.  Heard endless complaints and whining from them about having writing assignments such as writing a couple of 3-5 page papers over the entire semester because it was “too much work” and “a huge waste of time”. 

In short, a good start to solving this problem is to overhaul the woefully inadequate state of grammar and writing education at the K-12 level.

Leah,
Nice how you ignored the VERY respected online programs I listed.

While I agree, that having some parents homeschool scares the shit out of me - religious fundie homeschoolers for one, there are many other homeschooling families, that are more than adequately qualified - as in, both parents share the homeschooling, often with multi-subject area degrees between them.  Some also enlist private instructors who happen to be experts in their fields for one on one experiences for their kid. 

While things may be different in Australia, seeing (as a prof reading their papers, and hearing their classroom contributions) students that ed departments are considering qualified to teach - was one of the reasons we decided to homeschool. They may be very nice people, but at least in the US, it doesn’t surprise me that the academic abilities and attitudes of ed majors are often looked at askance by other departments.   

Add to that the politics of school corps, where teachers in my state often teach outside their subject area, or bad teachers aren’t fired because they have tenure and it’s too much trouble for the administration…. need I go on?

AS for large classrooms - I have experienced a class of 50 (as a student) with one teacher and NO aides. It went very well.  But that was long ago; the teacher had absolute control, including corporal punishment at her disposal, and the backing of the parents in using it, though I do not ever remember her using it.  We learned much for our ages, far beyond what would today be considered possible or desirable.

Multiple camps, Bagelsan. And liek I said, critical mass, yet room for all.

Yet surprisingly, Exholt, those STEM majors, particularly the mathematics-minded are often outstanding in fields like philosophy when they allow themselves to get into it. 

Unfortunately, I share your skepticism that teaching critical theory would be anything more than an attempt at futility for most undergrads, esp. at the intro levels.

Yet surprisingly, Exholt, those STEM majors, particularly the mathematics-minded are often outstanding in fields like philosophy when they allow themselves to get into it.

That’s mainly if they’re taking easy intro-level courses designed mainly for non-majors or a sub-field related to their STEM majors such as Symbolic Logic. 

Considering the reactions of a bunch of STEM majors when they ended up dropping an intermediate-level Russian History class they thought would be an “Easy A” when they found we’d have to read some Marxist-Leninist theory and the Prof was going to assign 500-800 pages of weekly reading and 2 research papers between 10-25 page each, I can easily see them fleeing in absolute terror at taking philosophy courses dealing with Hegelian and Marxist thought, Critical Theory, or anything to do with post-modernism/post-modernist thought. 

To be fair and to go back to the discussion on writing…..one reason why Critical Theory and post-modernism gets the negative rap of being “too hard”, “inscrutable” or “intellectual wanking” is that the English translations of many theorists seems to leave much to be desired and many post-modernist/Critical Theory scholars IME seem to write in an extremely convoluted manner meant to tease and frustrate anyone who is not a pomo/Crit Theory specialist and was probably an exercise in scholarly obscurantism meant to highlight the author’s “scholarly sophistication” bonafides in the eyes of his/her fellow pomo/Crit Theory specialists. 

However, IMHO….in terms of convoluted horrid writing styles…..they have nothing on political scientists…..and I say that as someone whose interest in that field is so strong to be willing to be subjected to it even after graduating college.

WEll, OK, if they refuse to even get into the calss - yeah, problem.  But most I’ve found can indeed “handle it,”  if they take the opportunity. 
Pomo as a descriptive field is interesting, as a prescriptive - incoherent, and the scholars write that way, it seems to be dawning on quite a few readers that it’s because that’s about all pomo can yield.  The pomo emperor is indeed nekkid.

Exholt, great description of pomo writing! I mean, really, “abject object” anyone? I appreciate the playful quality, but the purposeful obfuscation is a bit much. Or should I say (purpose)full? I don’t think the emperor is naked, but the real problem with pomo academic writing is that it can talk itself into a maze and whether the emperor is naked or not becomes irrelevant to the reader. Of course, the best pomo stuff is playful and just plain fun.

Also agree that K-12 is really the root of the problem. I’ve had to read student scholarship essays for my job and oy vey, they were bad.  And these were cream of the crop kids writing essays for full ride scholarships.  It brings me back to the idea of grade inflation.  If we are starting from a very low standard to begin with, does that 4.0 really reflect the students’ effort, achievement, potential?

Considering the reactions of a bunch of STEM majors when they ended up dropping an intermediate-level Russian History class they thought would be an “Easy A” when they found we’d have to read some Marxist-Leninist theory and the Prof was going to assign 500-800 pages of weekly reading and 2 research papers between 10-25 page each

Well, you saw my comment about how many hours a lot of STEM majors have to spend on STEM classes, right? I love to read, I like the humanities, but there is no way I would be able to go to a 2 hour lecture, continue on to a 4 hour lab, go to the library to study my STEM class material, and then start reading 800 pages for an “optional” class. I took accelerated intro Japanese along with my STEM-ish and core classes my freshman year, and the sheer amount of time I had to put into the damn thing really screwed my grades in classes that mattered, and didn’t do a thing to fulfill any requirements (I’d already tested out of my language req.) So in the end it was just a handicap to my actual goal of doing well in science—and if I’d wanted to go into medical school, any handicap like that would have been deadly.

And, phylosopher, if it’s multiple camps why can’t you just send them to 1 or 2 camps per short break? The don’t all need to be back to back. I’ve already described how having that huge long break fucks over a lot of lower income kids (or kids in crappy schools) and your insistence that it’s vitally important for your kids to go to space camp (d’you think any of the public school kids I’m talking about could afford that shit?) in the face of very clear disadvantages to the vast majority of less-privileged students is kinda pissing me off. I mean, jeeze, if not given every possibly music/dance/baseball/math/space/horse camp advantage possible, your poor children might have to wait until they’re an ancient whopping 16-years-old to go to college instead of getting in at 15. :p

Well, you saw my comment about how many hours a lot of STEM majors have to spend on STEM classes, right? I love to read, I like the humanities, but there is no way I would be able to go to a 2 hour lecture, continue on to a 4 hour lab, go to the library to study my STEM class material, and then start reading 800 pages for an “optional” class. I took accelerated intro Japanese along with my STEM-ish and core classes my freshman year, and the sheer amount of time I had to put into the damn thing really screwed my grades in classes that mattered, and didn’t do a thing to fulfill any requirements (I’d already tested out of my language req.) So in the end it was just a handicap to my actual goal of doing well in science—and if I’d wanted to go into medical school, any handicap like that would have been deadly.

They weren’t the best of the STEM students at my college as I’ve also encountered more than a few STEM majors who not only made it a point to take humanities/social science courses beyond the easy-intro levels….but also do another major in that field alongside their STEM field…a phenomenon that is common enough that it is not considered anything special.  One such student was in my advanced Chinese politics seminar where the reading load was more than that intermediate Russian History class and involved writing one 20-40 page research paper which counted for the vast majority of the final grade.  She was taking that course to complete her major requirements for East Asian Studies alongside her STEM major in Biochemistry.  Had another friend who was doing a double-degree program in which he majored in biology and Violin performance and after several application attempts is now going for his Phd in bio at Harvard…..and the level of competition in the Conservatory was such that students would literally practice 8-10 hours/day every day in order to not fall behind and possibly get dropped from the program and school. 

As for whether it is a good idea for children under the traditional age to attend college, I’m of the belief that if a student is ready to tackle to undergrad studies and can handle him/herself in a relative mature manner*, there’s no real legitimate reason to hold them back beyond hackneyed stereotypes from adults about children under the age of 16.  A part of my experience with this is actually having a few college classmates who were as young as 14 who had no problems living independently in the dorms with the rest of us undergrads and not only got along well with us, but excelled and blossomed in the great intellectual environment a university/college could provide….especially in comparison to the vast majority of K-12 schools….even the better public and private ones. 

Bagelsan,

You may want to look at early college programs for young children such as Simon’s Rock of Bard who enroll children at least as young as 12 to see how most of them end up benefiting far more from being in an undergrad environment rather than being forced to remain in their intellectually stifling junior high/high schools. 

Especially when one considers how in the experiences of most people I’ve known and read about in the MSM who attended mainstream junior high/high schools….the supposed benefits of the average K-12 school’s “social education” from similarly aged peers is not only quite dubious…but even highly specious.  I cannot help but wonder whether some people who make such arguments are doing so to justify effectively punishing the very bright and/or hard working academic achievers for their “crime” of having the capabilities to greatly exceed the academic/intellectual capabilities of the vast majority of their same-aged peers and thus, must be punished for “rising well above what society feels their capabilities should be at that age”. 

* Considering the countless idiotic antics I’ve seen traditionally aged and older college students pull in and around the Boston and NYC areas, I don’t think it is fair to effectively hold the highly gifted under-16 students to a much higher behavior and maturity standard.

Exholt, great description of pomo writing! I mean, really, “abject object” anyone? I appreciate the playful quality, but the purposeful obfuscation is a bit much. Or should I say (purpose)full?

Though I can see where critics of pomo theory are coming from having to read pomo theory analysis journal articles for my college lit courses, the political scientists’ journal articles tend to be so horrific in their writing style they IMHO that they seem to aspire to it as a fine art form.  As I said before, the pomo scholars have nothing on those political scientists in that department…. 

As for my comment on obscurantism, I do believe it exists in every academic field to some extent as both a gatekeeping mechanism and as a means for many specialists to gratify their own elite scholarly egos and to tease non-specialist undergrads and the public at large whose efforts to read and understand writings geared mainly for fellow specialists usually result in must frustration at the seemingly convoluted writing styles.

I think the difference is that pomo is about playing with language by definition, while PoliSci academics are just bad writers with a tendency to bloviate.

What’s funny is that there are a number of post-modern feminist critiques of the masculinist/objectivist discourse in traditional science in which the writer will point out, in the most jargony pomo language possible, that scientific language functions as a gatekeeping device against women.

But I think people tend to concentrate on jargon and ignore the power that the best post-modern writing has. I always use Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto as an example of great pomo writing. And she’s actually a STEM person (PhD in biology), so science and pomo aren’t incompatible.

Bagelsan,

You may want to look at early college programs for young children such as Simon’s Rock of Bard who enroll children at least as young as 12 to see how most of them end up benefiting far more from being in an undergrad environment rather than being forced to remain in their intellectually stifling junior high/high schools.

Maybe you’re thinking of someone else? I haven’t argued against letting kids into college early—I was teasing phylosopher about his very-very-special-brilliant children and their summer camps, and I think his kids are home schooled anyways, so it’s not really about the high school environment at all.

I personally hated elementary and middle school, barely tolerated high school, and loved college; it probably would have been beneficial for me to go into college early, just because the environment suited me so much better, but I turned down the offer* when I was 16 ‘cause I hadn’t gotten my depression under medical control yet. In my case it was just bad timing for me personally, and it was better to flounder around at less-than-peak performance in high school rather than in college, at which point I was somewhat less ill.

*this is the thread for not-so-subtly bragging about how clever** we are, yes? ;p

**answer: so clever

Bagelsan, your error riddled assumptions are indeed showing.  My kids, a) worked their asses off all year in various ways to earn $ to go to space camp because mom and dad can’t afford it all, including foregoing birthday/Xmas gifts in lieu of cash for camp b) the camps I’m talking about are generally the type that try to offer a scholarship to kids who can’t afford it, based on a critical mass of paying campers to foot most of the bill.  My thought was that if there weren’t a critical mass for some of these camps - like hey, one local high school does Latin Camp, utilizes high school students as “instructors” @ $50 for 5 half days.  Not exactly the most popular camp compared to e.g. the sports camps.  If you had breaks scattered all over with various year round schools, my guess is, it wouldn’t happen, and everyone would lose.

exhots@152 - that’s true not only in academia but even in the “lowliest” of fields.  Acronyms and jargons indeed are utilized as gatekeepers - hang out at ....a racetrack , 4 legged variey… and see if you can understand the banter and instructions ...or a car dealership repair shop.

sorry about the misspelling of exholt - tired fingers.

Acronyms and jargons indeed are utilized as gatekeepers - hang out at ....a racetrack , 4 legged variey… and see if you can understand the banter and instructions ...or a car dealership repair shop.

If acronyms and jargons are all the problems that exist in pomo or political science journal writings, then the problems I described would not be nearly as bad as what I’ve described.  Add those along with a convoluted writing style which an average undergrad or even a well-educated non-specialist would find frustrating and indecipherable.  This I believe is the most serious problem in Pomo and poli-sci journal writing.  I’m talking excessively long sentences filled with overly ornamental phrases, semi-colons, commas, colons, and more which would be considered among the hallmarks of bad writing styles by most of the English writing teachers I’ve had. 

Then again, maybe my English teachers were the exceptions in having expectations that the best forms of writings for the purpose of conveying information to others are ones which are succinct, direct, and sparing in the use of ornamental language so they could be easily read and comprehended by the non-specialists and the public at large.

*this is the thread for not-so-subtly bragging about how clever** we are, yes? ;p

I think of it more as marveling at how US K-12 educational standards are so low that many “Real American” college grads…even the Ivy/Ivy-level ones can be considered “so clever”. 

Then again, I speak from the perspective of knowing some East Asian education systems well enough to know that if I or most of my private SLAC or Ivy students I’ve met went through and were judged by their standards….we’d probably wouldn’t even be qualified to enter many vocational/apprenticeship training programs….much less get into the academic high schools necessary to take the national college entrance exams.  Exams which 33% or in China’s case…over 50% of the applicants fail to score high enough to get into any university even after demonstrating their academic bonafides in middle school….including demonstrating proficiency in basic writing.

Wait a minute though exholt, I’m no fan of the US system, but one thing I have noticed with East Asian students is their inability or unwillingness to be original - rote memory - greatuthoritarian communist legacy? Afraid to break conformity?

ugh should have read - rote memory/regurgitation of facts - great.  Communist authoritarian legacy?

ugh should have read - rote memory/regurgitation of facts - great.  Communist authoritarian legacy?

You would think so, but will be completely incorrect for two reasons.  One is the fact that this national college entrance exam/testing and tracking at each stage system has been in use in non-Communist East Asian countries such as the ROC(Taiwan), South Korea, and especially Japan for more than a century.

Second, the ideological and legacy this system is derived from is much older than anything remotely associated with what we know as modern Communism. 

The legacy is derived from the Confucian/neo-Confucian-based Imperial Chinese Civil Service examination system which in its last incarnation dates as far bad as the Tang Dynasty in the latter part of the first millenia CE and if one wants to look further…as far back as the Han dynasty.  Imperial China was the first civilization to use anything resembling a meritocratic standardized testing system to determine suitable candidates for positions in the imperial civil service*.  It was a system not only widely adopted in many East Asian countries with some alternations during the late first millenia and early second millenia, but also by the the British Empire from the East India Company and from the British…the United States in the 1880s.  The British and the United States were not only trying to find a more “systematic” way to select suitable candidates for their civil services because of industrial revolution influences, but also to move away from past systems of aristocratic birth, nepotism, and political patronage as the dominant systems of selecting civil servants as was the case before the implementation of what we now know as modern civil service examinations. 

* With a few notable exceptions, the examinations were officially open to any commoner who had the ability and drive to pass the 3 stage series of exams to become an imperial civil service scholar-official.  In practice, the amount of memorization of Confucian classics, poetry forms, calligraphy practice, and more that was required meant that one had to come from a well-off home or have a wealthy benefactor to allow the young man(women were barred from the civil service) to spend the years of time studying necessary to even have a chance of passing the exams…..a prospect daunting by the fact the examination pass rates were so cutthroat it makes even the cutthroat modern East Asian education system and national college entrance exams look extremely mild in comparison.

East Asian students is their inability or unwillingness to be original - rote memory - greatuthoritarian communist legacy? Afraid to break conformity?

Unfortunately, one of the effects of the neo-Confucian legacy on the Imperial Civil Service and the modern education systems of most East Asian countries is the fact that creativity and originality are often seen by education officials, teachers, and parents as disrespectful and serious disruptive challenges to the accepted social order, even in currently democratic societies like Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan. 

However, it has been my experience that the best students of the bunch still manage to retain their creativity and originality despite going through such systems and they tend to be clustered at many topflight Phd/graduate programs in US, especially in the Arts and Sciences. 

Moreover, your perspective may be skewed by the fact that most East Asian grad students and undergrads, especially the ordinary average students among them tend to go into STEM or other pre-professional majors at most US mainstream colleges where creativity and originality are not as emphasized as in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts.  As someone who attended a private SLAC with a well-known Conservatory, there were plenty of creative and original East Asian students at my college….including some who have already composed notably original new pieces of music in the classical music world.