Posted on 11/03/2011 7:49:17 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Cost-benefit analysis may not be their strong suit but education majors may have figured out how to get the best return on their investment from college. “More than 50 years ago scholars were already noting the low grading standards in university education departments,” Jason Richwine and Andrew G. Biggs wrote in a report published by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis. “The Journal of Higher Education reported in 1960 that 32 percent of students in education courses received ‘A’ grades, compared to just 16 percent in business courses.”
“A half century later, the situation is little changed.” The report was a joint publication from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Richwine works at the Heritage Foundation while Biggs serves at AEI. “Economist Kevin Rask collected data on course grades at a Northeastern liberal arts college from 5,000 students who graduated between 2001 and 2009,” Richwine and Biggs claim. “Out of the 20 academic departments included in Rask’s data, education awarded the highest grades.”
“Although Rask’s data come from only one college, his results are consistent with a larger study of three state universities in the Midwest. Economist Corey Koedel recently analyzed grade point averages (GPAs) at Indiana University, the University of Missouri, and Miami University of Ohio,” Richwine and Biggs report.” He found that education majors had substantially higher GPAs than students majoring in the hard sciences, social sciences, or the humanities.”
“Education majors at Indiana University, for example, had an average GPA of 3.65, while math, science, and economics students averaged 2.88.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
education majors have the lowest sat’s and gre’s,
along with journalism, sociology, anthropology, and phys ed majors.
Were education majors producing students who could actually read, write, and do math, we’d be a lot less critical of them.
However, I’m beginning to look at high school credentials before the college ones on new hires.
Public school?
Downgrade.
For obvious reasons.
My 2 daughters that went to college majored in accounting, for one of them, and civil engineering for the other. The latter is completing work for her masters.
I told them when they were kids that a college education is a waste of money unless you learn a hard skill. The rest is expensive fluff and indoctrination.
The former is an accountant, the latter is still working with the city’s transportation department as an intern while in school. BTW, she was one of over 2,000 applicants for the internship.
I forgot to mention that I majored in pinball and chicks in college and dropped out halfway through my sophomore year.
I got better, though. :-D
That’s not very astute. I would say that most of the people who post here went to a public school.
Studying a language or literature at the college level is fluff then?
Ya know, threr was a post the past couple of days that said PE teachers are making $80K now.
Agreed. Everyone in my family has gone to public school, as did my two children who also have college degrees and are gainfully employed in their fields of study. The only ones in the family with “troubled” records are my two nieces, who went to Catholic grade schools and high schools. One has served several years in prison, and the other has felony charges pending.
—it was well known by the “students” when I was in college in the late ‘50’s that if you couldn’t make it in engineering or the sciences (real science, not “social”—) , you could switch to “Education” and become a teacher-—
So, apparently, the Liberal professional education thinking, of the educator being soft on the students, originated in the college and university schools training the educators.
Naturally, in as much those going into education as a profession know how much that thinking, on the part of their college professors, helped elevate their grades, deserved or not, they feel inclined to pass along the lax standards that helped them get their jobs.
I will go along with you in the comment on indoctrination since that seems to be what many college professors engage in nowadays, but if that were not the case, would you agree that college should be more than just job training, which is what I think you think of college. There is a difference between just job training and education. You do see what I am getting at?
Otherwise, why don't we just do away with colleges and set up job training institutes? I can see an engineering institute, an accounting institute, and the like.
Yes, we agree. That said, I think that the other positives of college beyond job training should be like steak, clothing or cars.
People should get the one they can afford based on their income level. It is optional, while the job training is sorta important stuff.
And besides, with the internet today, what college has to offer has actually diminished in value compared to what one can gain, education wise, on their own. Heck, I’m learning Java for free on the internet. And anything a liberal arts degree can teach you I can easily find.
And then there is the advantages of being a person given a natural curiosity about the world. Attach that to a high speed internet account and there is little a college can do for you that you can not do for yourself. Even get laid by a coed.
“Studying a language or literature at the college level is fluff then?”
If the language is Japanese or Chinese, then no. If it is Old English, then yes.
Literature should be read, not studied in college, unless the person studying it is independently wealthy.
In the 70s, the University I went to reviewed grades. IIRC, the College of Science had an average GPA of 2.1, while the Ed majors were averaging 3.6 - because, of course, ed majors were so much smarter than science majors.
I’m not talking about Ed. Majors but English majors in this case. Literature benefits from academic study - it’s an academic field. English is a hard major. Reading Henry James and James Joyce doesn’t lend itself to the intellectually lazy.
I disagree with your last two paragraphs. And that derives from our widely-varying views on what constitutes a college education. Despite the easy access to information available to us on the internet, the deep understanding that one can get from a good college professor on any given subject way exceeds that which one can get from reading material on the internet.
In other words, one really cannot educate himself. Not from the perspective of the OldPossum.
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