Everybody Above Average

...and Gold, to his credit, stated that these instant analysis sessions serve little purpose...

...This is why many talented students find it difficult to accept intellectual discipline, and to accept the authority of those who profess and transmit it...

...2) that equal opportunity will make for equal results...

...The latter irrelevant--and unconstitutional--inclusion is now sponsored as ~'affirmative action" by, yes, the federal government...

...In fiscal year 1971-72 the state of California spent $352 million less for welfare than had been projected, and by the end of 1972 nearly three-quarters of the state's fifty-eight counties had reduced their property taxes...

...This reasoning cannot apply to present open admissions policies...

...The educational inflation could not occur without the cooperation of colleges...

...No more than 35 percent of the college age group should study for degrees and faculties should be reduced accordingly...

...It matters not at all whether the selective process is meant to irrelevantly exclude or include groups (sexual, racial, religious, educational) in any proportion, including the proportion in which they occur in the total population...

...Colleges are non-profit organizations...

...There are two possible approaches to the rationing problem: one minimizes distinctions between different classes of welfare recipients, by treating those who can work the same as those who cannot...

...Whence the educational inflation with its attending evils...

...WASHINGTON)--That was a week, that was...

...The alternative, best represented by the present (reformed) California system, makes a sharp distinction between those who genuinely need help and those who do not...

...This was indeed done...

...Hence, it was better to educate them to whatever degree they were capable of being educated...

...There is reason to believe that the IQ of most is now below that...

...Authority can be transferred to those who stand in loco parentis only if there is parental authority to be transferred...

...We live in a society that believes (1) that opportunity ought to be equal for all...

...But it is not fostered by refusals to exercise authority and by acceptance of anyone and anything...

...The dollar savings to the state and counties have been substantial...

...Many students, therefore, are tempted to regain it by playing the role of revolutionaries, rebels against authority, in the psychodrama for which the university has allowed itself to be used as a stage setting...

...The expansion has been incredibly rapid...

...Many students reach higher education without ever having been led to accept the authority of persons or institutions, and without having been asked to do anything requiring a major effort...

...Continuing Bitterness In what was billed as his final television speech to the nation, the (former) VicePresident reasserted his innocence and indicated that his resignation was not ~an admission of guilt, but a plea of no contest, done to quell the raging storm...

...California's experience has caused me to doubt the viability of the negative income tax as a means of welfare reform...

...It either allows those who can work to receive welfare as a matter of right (FAP and the negative income tax), or of practice (the present welfare system...

...What Is the Lesson...

...Another way of dealing with the problem is to institute "relevant" courses--relevant not to cognitive knowledge, but to headlines and the--often iatrogenic--psychological problems which the students suffer...

...Students drop out anyway--but because of boredom rather than low grades...

...There is nothing wrong with letting anyone who wishes attend college courses whenever possible...

...Faculties, of course, were inflated in the same proportion...

...This is double the proportion of twenty years ago...

...What can be done...

...Promotion and pay largely, if indirectly, depend on enrollments...

...Hence, the result of open admissions is not post facto selection, but grade inflation and lower standards...

...If they do at all it will be because of their college degrees which--the symbol being confused with what it symbolizes--are The Alternative December 1973 11 taken as proof of education...

...Sometimes open admissions are justified by stressing that in the past the offspring of the nobility was admitted even when unfit...

...They are afraid of being blamed for the students' failing and they don't want to be unpopular...

...Neither Gold nor Broder had much to say, except that they were "confused...

...Last, though not least, business has used degrees, however irrelevant to the tasks at hand, as a sifting device in hiring...

...Nonetheless, faculties and administrations make their living through them, and that living tends to be better, the greater the total attendance...

...But even encounters and high grades may not suffice to restore the students' identity and prestige in their own eyes...

...Since more than 40 percent of the age group now attend college, and only 25 percent have the required IQ, a significant number cannot benefit unless the curriculum is adapted to their understanding, i.e., degraded...

...The students admitted would not have occupied positions of leadership automatically and independently of their education...

...Open admissions often are also justified as acts of corrective justice to disadvantaged minorities--as though the function of colleges were to equalize social disadvantages rather than to educate...

...It will remain so as long as students who are manifestly irrelevant to college education are admitted...

...The easiest way to deal with the problem is to hide it, by giving higher grades for lower achievement...

...The Democrats, in a true spirit of reconciliation, promised Nixon bell's fire if he attempted to 12 The Alternative December 1973...

...Many Americans believe in education as they used to believe in religion...

...The result is that far more professors teach and do research than are competent to do either, and far more students attend than could benefit--even if they were taught by competent professors...

...Many students never have experienced it, and therefore i:md it hard to accept the authority of the law and the university...

...The victim of this investigation has, in fact, been the Vice-President, and not the Maryland Democratic Party...

...So much the worse for the federal government...

...The students are right then in claiming that college education is often irrelevant to them...

...The government has found it easier to yield to the pressure which industry has not opposed...

...The recent problems of higher education spring from educational inflation...

...Now is the time for everyone to quote Lord Acton's perennial truism that 'tall power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely...

...Yet the demand for college education is by no means wholly contrived, even if the colleges are guilty of complicity and instigation...

...Education" is the cheapest way (for the unions) of doing so...

...Thus, colleges offer "encounter workshops" in which students try to find their identity, of which the attempt to master alien ideas has robbed them...

...Selection on any basis other than the qualities relevant to the job is "discrimination" and should be made unlawful...

...Without rationing by need, it must set low levels of payment to all recipients, for the system will only tolerate so much relief...

...College is thought to equalize capacities...

...It is wrong, however, to promise a degree when not warranted by expected achievement, and even more wrong to give it---whether or not the nonachievement is disguised by ungraded courses, or grade inflation, or courses in education, or in baking bread, or in other subjects which, whatever their importance, cannot be taught profitably because they lack cognitive content and are irrelevant to the activities for which they are supposed to prepare...

...Universities must become selective in what and how they teach, in hiring and keeping professors, and in admitting students...

...Labor all too often welcomes education to keep people out of the labor market as long as possible...

...And although Agnew had only the highest praise for President Nixon (and his vice-presidential nominee, Gerald Ford) during his television speech, in an earlier interview with the Nashville Banner, Agnew stated that intense pressure from the highest levels of the Nixon Administration had forced him to resign...

...This is being done successfully...

...3) that equal education equalizes opportunity and thus, ultimately, results...

...Education transfers much of the cost of apprenticeship to the taxpayer--even if it is a comparatively inefficient way, in many cases, of preparing for the business at hand...

...The very word "education" here helps to mislead people since it conflates the process of being educated--which may or may not succeed--with its successful accomplishment or product...

...And for those who know Maryland politics, this is an irony which has not gone unnoticed...

...If, on the other hand, the alumnus does not "make it" by virtue of his education, what the college has created is ambition untethered to possibility-an unhappy person likely to hold society responsible for his frustration and who, therefore, will be harmful to it...

...Only about 25 percent of the college-age group have the IQ (110) required by previous standards to benefit from college education...

...The administration thinks of students as consumers: the product must be adapted...

...But what is the lesson...

...Yet in many cases the preference for college graduates is irrational...

...Thus ended what had promised to become another log cabin American success story...

...As for instructors, an IQ of 140 was once thought necessary...

...What apparently had begun as an anonymous phone call to the Internal Revenue Service about political graft and corruption in Baltimore County (a long-time Democratic stronghold) quickly mushroomed beyond what anyone had really expected...

...Successor Named With the Vice-President's resignation the debate quickly focused upon who would be nominated as his successor...

...However, industry, labor, and the government have connived...

...An unprecedentedly high proportion of the college-age group--more than 40 percent-now attends college...

...Vice-President Agnew resigned, pleaded no contest to an income tax evasion charge, was fined $10,000, and received three years of unsupervised probation...

...Parents, finally, cannot escape a share of the blame for the present situation...

...There is a psychological advantage, but in neither case do the returns justify the additional schooling...

...This is done...

...This idea was bound to lead to "open admissions," i.e., admission for credit of students who have given no indication of a capacity to profit from college education...

...It is, on the whole, within their power to stop it...

...For our politicians and our social pundits there could be no more opportune time for the July Fourth rhetoric which usually accompanies such events...

...Agnew thus failed to still what many see as the continuing bitterness among Agnew partisans over the former Vice-president's being hounded out of office by "Nixonites...

...Colleges have played a decisive role in creating educational inflation, and they could stop it...

...If the ability to learn is excluded as admissions criterion, education is not likely to succeed...

...But the true tragedy is that while many will speak of the moral code elected officials should live by, not all will believe their own eloquent hot air, and even fewer will live up to it...

...From poor boy to Baltimore County Executive, from Maryland Governor to Vice-President (Spire who...

...The events which forced the Vice-President to resign are undoubtedly both a personal and a national tragedy...

...Anyway, it would upset the arrangement to do otherwise...

...Prestige is all too easily lost in unsuccessful attempts to master intellectual disciplines...

...I guess it's that they just don't make things like they used to, including party machines...

...Educating requires learning as well as teaching...

...District Court Judge, Walter Hoffman, called the (former) Vice-President's no contest plea the full equivalent of a guilty plea...

...The experience in California affirms the practicality of rationing by need-which seems a far more equitable system than those that depend on severe acrossthe-board limits on the size of the grants...

...This is one reason why colleges have attempted all too successfully to expand continuonsly over the last twenty years--with the results about which they now wonder...

...Such a preference should be regarded as "discriminatory," in the invidious sense, whenever the college education has no demonstrable relevance to the job to be filled...

...Instructors are unlikely to present materials from which the gifted can benefit when the rest of the class would be unable to follow...

...The best people that can be found should be selected as students and professors, regardless of race, religion, or sex, or anything else, except for those dispositions of character that make a person capable of living in an intellectual community and make it possible later as well to benefit from having lived and learned there...

...But education can be harmful if it is transformed into schooling, over-extended, and imposed on those who are not able to benefit, by those not able to educate...

...Differences in past records are thought to have been produced by different opportunities--not by different inherent capacities or inclinations...

...The materials they end up presenting do not amount to a college education...

...They could limit admissions and rededicate themselves to cognitive learning at the college level...

...Best of all, while other states (e.g., New Jersey and Kansas) were cutting back welfare outlays across the board, the California reforms permitted the state to increase substantially (by an average 27 percent) grants to those remaining on the rolls who genuinely needed help...

...But in practice instructors hardly ever give failing grades to a majority, or even a plurality of students in their classes...

...They are convinced that attending college must be good and can do no harm, as they were convinced that attending church is helpful and never harmful...

...Whereas the unadapted curriculum teaches much to students who learn little, the adapted curriculum teaches little to students who learn little...

...In the process of attempting to educate the inept, the education of those who might benefit will necessarily be impaired, while very little is gained by those who are supposed to be helped...

...Fewer still have the disposition to listen to lectures for four more years after being compelled to do so for twelve...

...It was thought that the students admitted would occupy important and powerful social positions, independently of whether they went to college...

...Vic Gold, Agnew's former press aide turned syndicated Washington columnist, and Washington Post journalist David Broder, were on CBS immediately after the Vice-president's speech for one of those instant analysis sessions the Vice-President had so often criticized...

...And there have been ideological misapprehensions...

...Rehabilitation will be hard for them, for society, and for the universities...

...Why is it difficult even for bright students now to accept the authority of alma mater or, indeed, any authority...

...Since their product (knowledge) is irrelevant or inabsorbable to many of its consumers, colleges had to diversify and offer courses relevant to the students they have enticed, if not to higher learning...

...The prolongation of schooling for four years--more in many cases--for nearly half the age group, is not justified by the returns...

...of the United States, Agnew's political future once seemed limitless...

...One argument in favor of open admissions is that, after all, those who prove incapable will be dropped for unsatisfactory grades...

...As Plunkitt of Tammany Hall observed, good politics means loyalty, all the way to the prison gates...

...However doubtful their validity, these propositions are widely accepted, and because they are, the idea is widespread that everybody ought to have a college education, and would benefit from it--regardless of his capacity or previous school record...

...To demand that an applicant have a college education (when it is not relevant) is discrimination just as an irrelevant preference for race or religion is: irrelevant discrimination in terms of educational credentials ought to be prohibited legally just as racial discrimination is...

...Gold had also reportedly jumped out of his chair when Agnew had praised the President for the support he had given to him...