Men Checking out of College

The Wall Street Journal today has an article called "A Generation of American Men Give Up on College".  In it, we find such statistics as: women make up 59.5% of college students today.  In fact, for the 2021-2022 school year, 3,805,978 women applied to colleges compared to just 2,815,810 men.  That's just under 1,000,000 more women than men, despite the fact that men actually make up 51% of the college-aged population in the US.

White it is true that women have a higher enrollment rate than men for nearly every racial and economic group, the most impact is found in the lack of white men enrolling.  As the article states, "Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino, and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds." Given the demographics of the United States, the fact that white men aren't even bothering to enroll in college while white women are is enough to result in the numbers we see.

The article goes on about how perhaps there needs to be support groups for men too, despite the fact that the objection has been, "Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus?"  I find it ironic that the article actually quotes this without realizing the quote itself gives the reason why white men aren't going to college.

After spending K-12 being told that you are responsible for all that is evil in the world for free, why would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be told the same thing for four more years?  Higher education made an environment intentionally focused on preaching hatred of white men, and now they discover that white men don't want to be there.  Insert surprised Pikachu face here. Furthermore, why would anyone willingly subject themselves to such psychological abuse when the classes taught in universities have, by and large, made a university degree completely worthless anyway?

You want a specific demographic to show up in a place? Start by not hating them. A lesson that can be applied in all areas of your life too, if you really want to.

Led by the nose

Robert P. George

There is a widely believed myth that young people, especially college students, are "natural rebels" and "non-conformists." Nothing--absolutely nothing--could be further from the truth. I have taught thousands upon thousands of college students in my thirty-four years as a professor. The vast majority (though, of course, there are exceptions) are the opposite of rebels and non-conformists. They believe what they think they are supposed to believe, and they do what they think they are supposed to do.

Genuine independence of mind is not unheard of among the young, but it is the exception rather than the rule. It can (and should!) be provoked, but it takes effort on the part of a teacher or other person to provoke it. Most kids more or less uncritically--indeed unthinkingly--go along with what they hear, or think they are hearing, from opinion-shaping elites (whether it concerns pronouns, climate change, Halloween costumes, or whatever). Their greatest fear is to be "out of step" with the latest thinking or fashionable attitudes and beliefs. They sometimes censor themselves for fear of accidentally committing thought or speech crimes.

The Woke, and especially those in the vanguard of Wokeness, understand this and take full advantage of it. Of course, they don't acknowledge it, for the simple reason that they massively benefit from it politically. It underwrites "cancel culture" which has become a powerful weapon in the arsenal of Wokeness. And it explains the whole campaign to discredit the concept of freedom of speech (as a "right-wing trope") and to establish a climate on campus and more broadly that discourages (to put it mildly) expressions of dissent from prevailing progressive dogmas. It also explains the indoctrination programs that have become part of Freshman (oops! "First-Year") Orientation at most colleges and universities and continue in various forms through a student's four years. Those in the Woke vanguard know these programs work. Many young people are easily indoctrinated--they think what they're told to think. So everything depends on *what* they are told to think and *who* tells them to think it.

If you suppose that young people are "rebels" and "non-conformists," please just pause for a second to consider the sense of embarrassment and even dread fear a typical teenager experiences when he realizes that the sneakers he's wearing are not the ones all his friends are wearing. Horrors!

The problem with so many of our young people today is not that they are rebellious; it's that they aren't--and lack the courage to be.

Curved grading

I have a beef about traditional grading. Let's use seminary as an example. Take comprehensive exams. Professors don't expect students to get 100%. Few students get a perfect score. 

Yet that means they don't expect students to remember everything they were taught. But what's the objective of teaching? The objective is not to pass the test, but to master the material. If, however, there's too much material to remember, then students aren't learning what you're teaching. But why teach more than they can learn? Why teach more than they can remember? Shouldn't mastery be the goal?

Consider an exam on internal anatomy, in which a med student scores 90%. Say that's a passing grade. 

Say that means he can identify 90% of your internal organs. It's the other 10% he's confused about. Would you undergo an operation by a surgeon who could identify 90% of your internal organs? What about the pesky 10%? Is that a kidney or the spleen? Flip a coin?

Someone might object that surgical knowledge is a life and death affair, so there's not the same margin for error. But does that mean seminaries teach students lots of irrelevant stuff? 

A better approach might be short, weekly quizzes. Passage requires a perfect score, but they can retake the quiz until they get 100%. At least that way they know it all. They mastered all the material. They remembered what they were taught. They may forget some of that at a later date, but that's better then never knowing it in the first place. 

Then there's the tradition of grading on a curve. That's unfair for two reasons.

To begin with, curved grading is, in effect, a group grade. You're not being graded on the quality of your own performance. Rather, your grade is dependent on how all the other students performed, even though you have no control over their performance. 

But it gets worse. Some students cheat. And that raises the bar for the honest students, since curved grading averages the grades. If students weren't graded on a curve, then each student's grade would be independent of the others. But if some students cheat, that raises the bar for the other students by distorting the curve. Honest students are downgraded by the cheaters. Honest students get a lower grade than they'd otherwise get because they're competing with students who take unfair advantage. 

I don't speak as a disgruntled student. I was a high-performing student in college and seminary. I'm speaking on behalf of other students. 

New Jersey Bible Institute - Upcoming Seminar on History of the Bible

http://www.newjerseybibleinstitute.org/