Two Tales of Higher Education in North Carolina

The African woman below describes the ambience at an historically black college and compares that with the ambience at a college in an affluent white area. The scenery is undoubtedly better in the white area. She sees the facilities and scenery in the white area as conferring more opportunity on the students who go there. She sees the black college students as disadvantaged by comparison.

Yet she also says that the educational environment at the black college is very good and likely to help the students there to develop themselves in constructive directions

That seems a non-sequitur to me. Does nice scenery make you learn better? Any such influence is surely marginal.

The real difference between the two colleges lies not in facilities but in the family background of the students. The lush environment of the white college tells us that a lot of the parents of the students there are affluent. And affluence is substantially transmissable. The habits of thought and behaviour that made the parents and grandparents affluent will tend to be passed onto the children who will thus be well equipped to become affluent themselves.

So the advantage that the writer sees as coming from the college environment in fact comes from the family of the students there and little more. Different families lead to different lives

Aweek ago, I visited the first Historically Black College or University for women in the United States, Bennett College. The college itself is landmark, a beautiful representation of Black women, and a hallmark of Greensboro.

The women who attend and teach at the college are known as the Bennett Belles — epitomizing grace and intellect with every step they take. The campus is laid out intentionally with residential halls facing the academic buildings so that, as the tour guide informed me, “the young women of Bennett remain focused on what matters.”

At the tip of the campus is a brick chapel, which once hosted the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., facing gates that women can walk through only twice in their time at Bennett — when they first become Belles and when those Belles finally leave the ball (also known as graduation). The gates are parallel to the president’s home, which serves as the campus’ North Star.

As I sat, perched, at the bench in front of the chapel, I felt an overwhelming sense of joy mainly due to the fact that Black women had a place they could call home — a space in which they could and should delve into all their interests without remorse. I imagine that I would have felt this way had I gone to Spelman, another Historically Black College for Black women situated in Atlanta.

After speaking with the Black women who attended Bennett, my heart was full. Before me were tens of young women, from different walks of life, passionate about making the world a better place — and they had the added bonus of having each other to lean on.

That same day, I travelled to another higher education institution, Elon University, which was about 30 minutes out. I drove with a professor who also had not yet visited the university, and when we turned into campus, our jaws immediately dropped.

Flanked to our left was a beautiful brick building simply titled “The Inn” and ahead of us was a huge fountain surrounded by the greenest grass you could possibly imagine. (I later found out that Elon is known for being one of the most picturesque campuses in the country, and it surely lived up to its name.) The school was simply breathtaking.

Though my time at Elon was edifying and exciting (I taught my first class there based on my edited collection!), I could not help but think about the Bennett Belles, their campus, and how some years back the college was in the news for potentially losing accreditation. I could not help but think about how Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom discussed Bennett College in her piece about student debt for the New York Times. Or, how at present nearly all full-time first-time Bennett College students receive financial aid.

In comparison, a quick look at Elon University’s demographics suggests that the majority of college-age students are white, rich, and from the Northeast. Lots of students who attended the private school I graduated from landed at Elon. Though a fair amount of Elon’s students still need financial aid (~36 percent of first year students needed aid this past year), there is no shortage of resources.

The differences in facilities, for example, between the two schools are stark. At most public universities and HBCUs, separate colleges or departments may share floors or even a building. At Elon, and lots of private PWIs, colleges and/or departments have their own campus or building.

To me, these two colleges, thirty minutes apart, represented two completely different institutional realities, which differ along the lines of race, gender, and class in higher education.

Bennett College is more than equipped to educate students, but the noticeable lack of investment in HBCUs, like Bennett, that serve purposes beyond educating Black students, is egregious at best.

What’s more Elon isn’t unique in its proximity to whiteness and wealth (and the legacy thereof) in the higher education sphere. My dad used to say that predominantly white institutions are where the resources were concentrated. And he’s right.

In 2016, the United Negro College Fund found that Howard University, the HBCU with the largest endowment of $600 million, has a significantly lower endowment than the 10th place non-HBCU university, University of Michigan at $9.5 billion. Billions to millions. Comparing Elon and Bennett, Elon’s current endowment is 335 million as of 2021 while Bennett’s is $15 million. The differences are stark. Yet, the outsized cultural and economic impact of HBCUs are unparalleled.

At the crux, the [type of] access to higher education is an excellent representation of how inequality still shapes the spaces that generate opportunity. And how when we talk about who faces challenges in higher education, and who ends up makes decisions for students overall, there is a gap.

The two tales of higher education boils down to this: The Bennett Belles are as capable as anyone I met at Elon University, but because of their race, gender identity, and for many, class, they will not be easily granted the space to lead in the way Elon students will be expected to, they will not receive every resource they are entitled to.

Even amidst challenges faced, Bennett College students are thriving in every area, being selected for high ranking graduate programs, interning at Fortune 500 companies, and the list continues. What would happen if these women were granted the resources to go above and beyond what they’ve already achieved?

https://momentum.medium.com/the-two-tales-of-higher-education-197457b64ee1

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The Collegiate War on Excellence and Descent into Mediocrity

The United States has been considered a truly “exceptional” place because it excels in so many ways. It has the biggest output of goods and services. It has had the most powerful military presence on the planet for many years. Its technological advances have been the greatest of any nation. And, more relevant to this readership, surveys of higher education, conducted in such diverse places as London and Shanghai, say that America has a commanding proportion of the world’s greatest universities.

Yet, over the last generation, a remarkable and disturbing development has occurred: American universities are increasingly downplaying, ignoring, or even condemning their distinction in the production and dissemination of ideas that they have, historically, done so well. The genesis of this development goes back several decades. Around 1960, time-use data suggest that the typical college student spent around 40 hours per week in class, studying, writing papers, working in laboratories, etc., while earning a 2.4 or 2.5 grade point average—roughly one half “B” grades and one half “C”s. Fast forward to the present. Twenty-first-century data suggest a typical American college student spends under 30 hours per week on these activities (probably about 28), a 30% reduction from two generations earlier, yet the average grade point average is above 3.0—mostly “B”s, with a smattering of even higher grades.

Students are doing far less work for more recognition. If excellence associated with great achievement typically requires hard work and discipline, the present college-going generation is lacking, in large part because their professors are far less demanding than those in the past (grade inflation has been indirectly encouraged by the increasing dominance of an administrative staff contemptuous of academic values, a subject for another epistle.)

Colleges that, a half century or more ago, seemed eager to reward scholarly excellence with not only admissions but also generous financial aid are now obsessed with other things totally irrelevant to academic excellence, namely such biological characteristics as skin coloration, or even sexual preferences. I predict this will become embarrassingly obvious in the forthcoming Supreme Court cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, leading the court to restrict the race-preferential treatment that currently exists.

There are still other manifestations of a near contempt for the pursuit of excellence. The widespread abandonment of required SAT or ACT test results reduces the ability of college admissions officers to assess the academic performance of applicants. The attempt by law and medical schools to suppress the rankings of their institutions by magazines trying to measure excellence is yet another manifestation of this worrisome trend. Medical schools which ease learning requirements while promoting “diversity” could literally cost lives through incompetent health care in future years.

The biggest single cause of this descent into mediocrity is the enormous federal financing of student financial aid. Unlike nearly all private scholarship assistance, there are virtually no minimal performance criteria to get federal student loans or Pell Grants. Indeed, just the opposite. If a student fails a number of courses, takes a relatively low course load, and therefore takes five and one-half years to graduate, he will probably have received at least one-third more financial assistance from the federal government than the student who graduates in four years, or even less, summa cum laude. The attrition rate of Pell Grant recipients is very high—there is no financial pressure to excel or even to persist in amiable mediocrity.

There are some early signs that America’s research excellence is being significantly challenged as well. The number of non-American schools in global lists of the top 50 or 100 institutions is growing. Aside from declining research spending in the U.S. relative to other nations, the diminishing emphasis on research probably in part reflects the current American academic obsession with promoting essentially progressive, woke agendas as manifested by swollen and increasingly powerful diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that have no interest in promoting academic integrity and merit—indeed, often the opposite.

The disdain for academic excellence recently hit home for me. My wife and I made a gift to modestly augment an already existing scholarship endowment fund we had created at my university. The university often provides additional matching funds from unrestricted gifts to enhance the impact of a donation, but it would not do so for our scholarship because we have a stipulation that the monies must go to a good student who is in the top 20% of his high school class. The university did not like that restriction, and therefore no matching funds were provided. At my university, scholarships to promote academic excellence are disfavored relative to ones available to prospective students with mediocre secondary school or collegiate performance. Mediocrity trumps excellence.

At zero net cost to the government or society, we could significantly promote improved student academic performance. If we restricted federal financial aid provision for poorly performing students, we would save billions each year. For example, deny aid for all students after five years of study. Deny aid to students with lower than a “C” average, and impose some anti–grade inflation standards on colleges accepting federal student financial aid.

Suppose we then used the funds saved by giving $10,000 graduation bonuses to roughly 400,000 students annually who graduate both in the top one-quarter of their college class and with scores above the national average on a new National College Equivalence Examination (NCEE), a 3–4 hour test required for graduation from any U.S. university. The NCEE would measure both general educational literacy and success in a major field of study (I have discussed that exam elsewhere, notably in my book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America). This expenditure-neutral set of proposals would set us on the path to restoring and enhancing our reputation for educational excellence.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14421&omhide=true&trk=title

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Why Not Shut Down Public Schools That Don’t Educate the Kids?

Mike Weisser

Yesterday, I ran a column about my experience as a substitute teacher at Holyoke High School in Holyoke, MA. To be brief, I can only say that I have never encountered such a deplorable and destructive situation in any educational environment of any kind — deplorable because of the utter and complete chaos which engulfs every aspect of the school, destructive because generations of children are not being given the slightest opportunity to shape or grow their lives.

It was only after I posted the column that I learned the entire public school system in Holyoke has now been under state receivership for the last seven years. What this means is that back in 2015, the public schools in Holyoke were such a mess that the Massachusetts Department of Education had no choice but to take over running the system in an effort to end what had been the ‘chronic underperformance’ of Holyoke public schools.

What does the phrase ‘chronic underperformance’ mean?’ It means that too many students end their school years without knowing how to read or write.

According to most experts, what is referred to as ‘functional literacy,’ meaning the ability to read and write at what is necessary to hold even the most menial job, is equivalent to reading and writing at an 8th-grade level.

I didn’t experience a single moment yesterday at Holyoke High School where the atmosphere in any classroom was conducive to learning anything — reading, writing or anything else.

In one class a female student walked into the room, lay her head down on the desk, covered herself with her coat, and slept for the entire hour. She didn’t even wake up when the class session ended. And this was in the room where three paraprofessionals stood around talking to each other for the entire class period and none of them attempted to wake up this young girl, even when the other students were filing out of the room.

So, I walked over to this kid, tapped the desk until she woke up, and asked her whether she was getting any sleep at home.

To which she replied, “I always sleep here because I don’t like this class.” Note the word ‘always.’

Take a look at the school’s website: Holyoke High North Campus | Holyoke Public Schools. It says that the school provides “a frame of reference and field experience that connect academic work to the work of the world.”

It does? According to test scores, the school is currently graduating 81% of its students, of whom — ready? — only 27% can read and write at a tenth-grade level.

In other words, the learning experience of most of the kids who graduate from Holyoke High School is basically the same experience that the young girl is having who slept through the entire, hour-long algebra class.

And none of the paraprofessionals in the room even tried to wake her up when the class came to an end!

At one point during this particular class session, a woman appeared in the hallway and began chatting with one of the paraprofessionals standing at the entrance to the class. I walked over to these two ladies who continued conversing until the woman who had briefly appeared turned and continued walking down the hall.

I was told by the paraprofessional that the other woman was an assistant principal at the school, obviously a member of the school’s management team.

Did this woman bother to introduce herself to me and welcome me to the school on the first day of my job?

Of course not. Why bother introducing herself to me? After all, I was only the adult responsible for trying to teach something in that class.

But the point is, he administration which runs Holyoke High School isn’t interested in teaching anything at the school. When I asked a teacher why such a level of total chaos was being allowed to exist in the classrooms and the hallways, the answer was — you guess it — a shrug.

If a sizable number of students ambled into my classroom late for every class, what this tells me is that placing the school in receivership won’t change anything at all. If the State Department of Education wants to prevent Holyoke High School from unleashing a sizable number of kids every year who are totally unprepared to deal with the wider world, they have to come up with a plan that will prevent these kids from having any contact with the high school at all.

What happens to kids who attend Holyoke High School is what happens to kids who commit a serious crime and are sent to jail. What happens is they spend their jail time learning how to commit more crimes. At Holyoke High School the kids learn that showing up late for every class will have no practical effect on their ability to get through school.

Which means these kids will never learn what it means to show up for a job on time, never mind not being able to read or write. Which means they won’t get jobs even in an economy where the unemployment rate is less than 4 percent.

Holyoke High School should be shuttered and closed, the entire school administration fired, and all the students should be bussed to schools in adjacent school districts where there is actually a commitment to teach kids how to read and write.

For the first time in their entire lives, these Holyoke kids will find themselves surrounded by other kids who don’t wander around outside the classrooms after class sessions have begun.

And the peer pressure the kids from Holyoke will now experience will be exactly what they need in order to prepare themselves to grow and survive after their school years come to an end.

https://mikeweisser.medium.com/why-not-shut-down-public-schools-that-dont-educate-the-kids-1890e478846e

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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