It's a fact about college admissions at selective universities that the process is a tournament. When I teach about pay that varies with individual output, as a component to my course on the economics of organizations, we discuss different types of incentive contracts. Pay for performance, as we usually consider it, is based on absolute performance. Sales contracts, for example, are based on the dollar amount sold. Likewise, fruit pickers are paid by the number of bushels picked. Absolute performance is measured in the units of output, whatever those happen to be in the particular instance. Tournaments, in contrast, are based on relative performance, how the person ranked compared to the others in the competition. It is these rankings that determine the winners and the losers.
In a world where the absolute performance distribution is stable among the population, tournaments will produce outliers only if they have a small number who enter and then an even smaller number of winners. Small samples tend to produce outliers with some regularity. If, however, the numbers of entrants and the number of winners are both large (although the number of winners obviously needs to be less than the number of entrants), then the law of averages can make you pretty confident about the performance level of the winners. I believe that admissions at the U of I and other major public universities satisfy these large number conditions. (There are exceptions to this, such as athletes in the revenue sports, but let's ignore those here.)
There may be more systematic reasons from departures to predictable measures of output. Geography within the state of Illinois can matter for admission. A student who is from a comparatively poor rural district or is from an inner city school, in either case the school has fewer resources than a suburban school, may be measured more for future potential than for past performance. Conversely, students from the affluent district nowadays game the system much more than they did 45-50 years ago (when I was in high school and applying for college). For example, taking a private prep class to prepare for the standardized tests is quite common now. It did happen then, but was rarer. And now there is kind of an arms race about amassing AP credit. It mattered then too, but not nearly as much as now.
Let me offer two possible explanations for the gaming, both of which have some merit, in my view. One is the idea of leapfrogging. A kid who probably shouldn't be admitted participates in this sort of gaming to increase the likelihood that the kid will get admitted. But then, if kids like this game the system, the other kids who are likely candidates need to do it too, as a means of self-protection. The upshot is that by the established criteria for admission there ends up being more above the bar than can be accepted, so the process becomes something of a lottery. The other explanation is that the gaming serves as a substitute for the real type of academic preparation we'd like to see (mainly a lot of reading, done broadly and deeply). Measuring the real academic preparation is difficult, highly subjective, and provides its own sort of moral hazard. (If it is done primarily by the letters of recommendation that teachers write, and if the high schools are measured by the college placements of their grads, then the teachers will be under some substantial pressure to skew their evaluations upwards.)
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The above is meant as background information. Now I want to get at the heart of the matter. Over the years I have had a variety of students whom I felt ill prepared for college. Instructors are supposed to have high expectations for their students, for example see Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles. If you think of a course like a pipe, students enter at one end and exit at the other, and if you have have a reasonable expectation about the value added to the student while in the pipe, then it stands to reason that to meet end of pipe expectations the student must bring enough to the table when the student is entering the pipe. My sense of things is that the fraction of students who don't bring enough to the table has been increasing. The question is why.
My older son graduated from college in 2014. When he was in high school, perhaps a sophomore or junior, we made a family visit to the college advisor in the school. He told us something entirely unsurprising. The key to getting into a good college is to read a lot, read broadly, read challenging material; in a nutshell reading is the answer. My operating hypothesis is that kids who develop the reading habit, especially for reading done outside regular coursework, will end up with something on the ball. They'll be aware of quite a lot and will have started to try to understanding things by their own sense making. They won't rely on adults entirely to explain what is going on. My operating hypothesis is that even among the population of students planning to attend selective universities, reading is on the decline.
Recently I've read some screenplays by Paddy Chayefsky, including Network which became a very well known motion picture. In the screenplay the mad yet all too wise news commentator, Howard Beale, makes a speech decrying that the public doesn't read newspapers. Instead, they get all their information from "The Tube." For some reason, I found this comforting to read. The movie is from 1976. There was no cable TV then, or it was just starting at that time. There was no Fox News. Hearing cries of illiteracy among the public that are from more than 40 years ago ring true and remind us that this is an ongoing phenomenon, not a recent invention.
Yet Beale was talking about the overall population, many of whom watched him when he was delivering his rants on TV. What about the sub-population of students headed for selective colleges? Were they different from the rest? I wish I knew the answer to this. I know my own experience. I read the New York Times on a daily basis while in college (and in graduate school too). I'm guessing that many of my cohort in high school did likewise. But of the rest of the college population, I don't know. Were kids from the Chicago burbs different from the NYC kids this way? I don't know. Regional differences, cultural differences, generational differences, between them lies some explanation about their reading. I wish I had more information on it to better provide an explanation.
A concomitant issue is how instrumental students are about their learning in the classes they take. I wrote about this a little in my previous post. As with the reading itself, this has been an issue for quite some time. But I believe it has been accelerating, witness the gaming I discussed in the previous section. And here is the thing. A kid who is instrumental about his learning won't do much reading at all in his leisure time, because he won't get credit for it. So leisure time gets packed with other activities, most of which don't stretch the mind in the way reading does. (There is some argument that video games are potentially educative. I want to acknowledge the argument here, but note that I'm skeptical about the conclusion, and believe others should be skeptical about the conclusion as well.)
I also want to note that certain reading online - text messages, micro blog posts, and other social media, don't cut it as far as the the type of reading I mean that will make the kid grow intellectually. I'm certainly not against socializing with friends, sending photos, back and forth with cutesy emoticons and the like. It's all fine, in its place. But for producing intellectual development, getting the kids to develop their own sense of taste and worldview, it doesn't deliver.
If this diagnosis is largely correct, what should educators do about it? And what should parents do? Let me close with a little speculation. The key is from pre-school through elementary school. Reading is first a social activity done aloud, either before bedtime or at other times during the day. At some point the kids must be encouraged to do something similar on their own. To encourage this, make going to the library a festive activity. Make sure there are lots of books around the house for the kid to read. Talk about what the kid is reading during dinner. We need a carrots and not sticks approach to getting kids to embrace the reading habit. Once they do, they'll take it from there. It is our job to get them to that point.
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