Posted on 04/22/2004 8:45:42 AM PDT by Archangelsk
This article dovetails nicely to this op-ed from this morning: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1122337/posts
Let the "rich" pi$$ away their money financing the prestigious bastions of ivory-tower communism.
Those who have to work to earn their tuition often get more bang-for-the-buck at smaller, less costly institutions of higher education.
Don't fool yourself, the cost of higher education is phenomenally expensive regardless of where one goes.
Murray and Herrnstein predicted, in their controversial-but-brilliant work The Bell Curve, that as the marketplace grew more efficient at rewarding (with high salaries) his-intellect people (and especially as high-intelligence men and women married each other), then high-intellect and high-salary would become synonymous, and the income/intelligence continuum would become an increasingly "efficient" stratification.
And, since intelligence is largely inheritable (as they also set out to prove, hence the controversial response to their work, including outright rejection by the liberal establishment), we are now seeing the effect in the children of intelligent-and-wealthy parents, namely, that the smartest kids are from the wealthiest families.
Murray and Herrnstein pointed out that this would cause unintended negative social effects, but at least the authors were smart enough to predict the problems -- whereas the politically correct college administrators seem dumbfounded that their social engineering policies seem to have failed.
It IS?
They're not dumbfounded.
They know exactly what they are doing.
They just lie about it all the time.
not surprising at all....
this is where my anger at discrimination and racial quotas arises.....
because these quotas never affect the rich kids.....it only affects the kids of the true middle class....the bread and butter and heart and soul of America...
I guess we can just go eat cake....
Yes and a couple years down stream, it matters not a twit what college you went to, if you are good at learning what your job is about. (I don't quibble that grades and schools are important for determining the initial salary.)
Pray tell, which prestigious University did the two current contestants for the Presidency attend?????? As well, as the Previous two Occupants of the Oval Office? (Clinton, Law Degree, Bush Sr. Economics)
Now if you Dont want to be President.....
Correct. The private colleges are continuing to increase their tuition at rates 3 times the rate of inflation. Why?
Because they turn around and say to applicants, "80%-90% of our students receive financial aid".
Translation: any parent who actually saved to fund their children's education is forced, just like the IRS tax code, to subsidize everyone else who didn't bother. SO the college education system acts as a powerful "double taxation" system, and therefore the numbers as regarding tuition are not "true" in the sense that the colleges expect only the 'rich' to actually pay those numbers.
And this article is admitting, though not openly, that middle class students -- who aren't expected to pay the full amount -- are nonetheless being scared off by the published rates.
Well, the colleges are reaping the consequences of what they have sowed, IMHO.
...
The emergence of a cognitive elite
Commentators from across the political spectrum have documented the profound social changes that all industrialized societies are undergoing at the end of the 20th century--erosion of the middle class, loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, and an emerging information age in which individual success will depend on brains not brawn. The Bell Curve tells a similar story regarding the United States. It differs from other works by focusing on intelligence, rather than education or social class as a causal variable. The authors tell us that true educational opportunity as a function of ability (measured by IQ tests) did not arrive in the United States until about 1950. Until that date only about 55 percent of high school graduates in the top IQ quartile went directly to college. From 1950 to 1960, this number jumped to 72 percent, and in 1980 over 80 percent of graduates in the highest ability quartile went to college. In addition, sorting by cognitive ability continues as students move through college. It also occurs across colleges, with the elite schools selecting the more intellectually talented students. Finally, it continues across careers in the world of work. The authors argue that intellectual stratification through occupations is driven by powerful economic pressures. This argument is based on a number of different and compelling lines of evidence. If Herrnstein and Murray are correct, current social inequalities reflect, in large part, the achievement of a meritocracy based on cognitive ability.
The notion of a meritocracy is not, in itself, an affront to American sensibilities. Social scientists have carefully documented that social mobility does occur from one generation to the next and that cognitive ability is a major factor in determining whether an individual will achieve greater or lesser social status than did his or her parents (Waller, 1971). When each generation resorts in this way, the elements of fairness and opportunity are preserved. If, however, as The Bell Curve asserts, the heritability of IQ is quite high and there is a strong tendency for those similar in ability to marry, there will be less regression toward the mean in the cognitive ability of children of the intellectually talented and, therefore, less intergenerational reassortment. Under these circumstances a meritocracy begins to look like an aristocracy, a perception that is strongly reinforced when the intellectual elite segregate themselves from the rest of society by living in separate neighborhoods, sending their children to private schools, and supporting social institutions that cater to their own unique interests.
The authors do argue that general cognitive ability (i.e., "g") is a major determiner of social status and that variance in general mental ability is largely attributable to genetic factors--propositions that are certainly endorsed by many experts in the field. The book explicitly disclaims, however, that general mental ability is the only determinant of social status, or that g is the sum total of an individual's social worth.
The role of social class of origin
The Bell Curve carefully documents in table after table, graph after graph that cognitive ability has become a more important determinant of social status than social class of origin. Although this may come as a surprise to many, it is consistent with a large body of evidence. Research methodology in the domain of individual differences has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Many investigators in this domain now accept two major methodological principles: that single studies based on small samples are inherently uninformative and that correlations calculated from data gathered within biological families are seriously confounded. Understanding both of these principles is important when evaluating evidence often brought to bear against The Bell Curve.
Results from a single modest study carry little more weight than does a single anecdote, no matter how compelling the finding. Most social scientists, but certainly not all, have adopted the methodology of meta-analysis, a statistical tool that systematically combines the results from many studies to provide a single reliable conclusion. In a similar fashion, behavioral geneticists combine the results from numerous kinships weighted by their sample sizes to provide the best estimate of the degree of environmental and genetic influence on any particular trait. Any single study is viewed as providing only weak evidence on its own.
The confound generated by data drawn from within biological families provides numerous pitfalls when assessing this book's claims and reviewers' counterclaims. Within a biological family, correlations (e.g., parental socioeconomic status x child's IQ) are ambiguous because the cause of the correlation could be the family environment or the parent's genes. Within biological families, the correlation between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and child's IQ, based on a meta-analysis of the literature, is .333 (White, 1982). However, in studies where genetic effects are held constant, through twin or adoption designs, the correlation drops dramatically (Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990; Scarr & Weinberg, 1978). Another striking exemplar of this phenomenon is the IQ correlation between unrelated individuals reared together who share a common family environment but lack a common genetic background. When the cognitive ability of these "unrelated siblings" is measured in adulthood the correlation is zero (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993). Thus the correlation between parental SES and offspring IQ in biological families is due, in some measure, to genetic endowment. Consequently, when examining the relationship between IQ and a dependent variable, to "hold constant" the SES of biological parents (on the grounds that SES is a competing "environmental explanation") results in an underestimate of the true influence of IQ. As early as 1970, Paul Meehl warned that "the commonest error in handling nuisance variables of the `status' sort (e.g., income, education, locale, marriage) is the error of suppressing statistically components of variance that, being genetic, ought not be thus arbitrarily relegated to the `spurious influence' category" (pp. 393-394). In this book, intended for lay readers as well as academicians, the authors have purposefully provided simple and straightforward analyses of SES and cognitive ability. They have, in many instances, understated the role of cognitive ability by holding SES constant. We can expect to see numerous reanalyses and the presentation of many more complex models derived to support both sides of the debate. The careful reader will remember Meehl's caution when examining the data and drawing conclusions.
As we have seen, these advantages make a HUGE impact.
LOL! One can do quite well in America without attending Harvard, and similiar schools. "Fundamental fairness" is a flawed idea as defined by Summers and the like. If you can't afford to go to Harvard, there are plenty of other schools to attend at much lower cost. No one should get upset that many can't afford to go to a particular school.
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