1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It so happens I went to high school in California. My math teacher mentioned how much interaction she had with the state universities, and also lamented the fact that universities offered remedial math courses. She felt that if somebody needed remedial math, they shouldn't be in a university; a junior college would be a better fit.
At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.
What does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education.
I wish it were dubious. I recently worked with 11th grade Algebra 2 students in New Mexico and found exactly that, and worse. Most couldn't begin to do algebra because they couldn't do simple addition and subtraction. Out of a class of 24 there were two who were arguably ready for it. But everyone is moved forward anyway. I understand your skepticism because I was shocked by it. The teachers said it all went down the drain during Covid and has not recovered.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
If a university's administration overlooks a complete failure of the student selection process, it's easy to imagine that it may well overlook a complete failure of the professor selection process. The price of admission is also way too steep to wind up being the peer of mental 8th graders.
At my liberal arts and sciences college about 10 years ago my entry level biology teacher straight up said to the class that if people are having trouble with some of this math on the board to go home and learn algebra tonight.
You'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.)
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
> why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture).
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves.
The top end may not be limited by money, but the bottom of education is, especially when it comes to public k-12 schools.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.
I can’t do a standing backflip. This is a true statement and contributes the same amount to a discussion about higher education in the US as “I know a kid that can do algebra”
what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.
You're absolutely right. Homophobia didn't increase. What changed was the social arenas that allowed men to form friendships in spite of it has dissolved. Loneliness is up because the institutions that used to make male connection safe: churches, fraternal orgs, bowling leagues, union halls, VFWs, softball teams, barbershops have all been gutted, turned into business ideas, or dissolved.
Think about your grandfather's era:
Yes, the culture was deeply homophobic. But a man could spend every Wednesday at the lodge, every Sunday at church, fish with his friends, hunt, drink, play cards—all in male spaces, no questions asked, no suspicions raised. There were scripted ways to be close to other men without risking masculinity. Did it solve everything? Hell no. Was it emotionally mature? Not really. But it worked as scaffolding for adult male friendship.
Now? The institutions that provided that cover are gone or crumbling. The internet replaced the Elks Club. Church is out, especially for millennials and Gen Z. So even as homophobia has declined in the culture, the absence of those shared spaces means men don't have anywhere to go be together without suspicion.
To clarify, I'm not saying that homophobia is up. I'm saying that the antidotes, the social architectures that let men be friends anyway, are gone. Residual effects of over a century of homophobia stand exposed with no institutions around to act as a counter.
Maybe you think that re-establishing or creating new institutions that serve as arenas for male friendship is the way forward. That's respectable, but every attempt adds to the graveyard of failed loneliness cures. Why? Because the factors that caused the decline of the past institutions are still in effect.
To me at least, it seems much more possible to teach folks how to build connection - the new institutions will follow.
Someone I know who's very "homophobic" justifies it for this reason. He argues that by accepting homosexuality men end up having to think of eachother the way they do women: either just potential enemies or people who might be upset about romantic interests.
I'm not sure that's right but there seems to be something too that idea. It might very well be that at least in the sense we do now widespread acceptance of homosexuality and platonic friendships just aren't compatible.
as an apple fan i can assure you this is exactly what I think, I just prefer the results that Apple's approach enables and wish legislators would let consumers choose it as opposed to forcing the results to look more like Android
You can choose. If Apple services are all you intend to patronize, then legislation won't stop you; it does stop Apple from using their dominant position to enforce less competitive terms for their competition. If you depend on Apple's market abuse to use your iPhone, I'll just tell you now; it's time to find a new workflow.
Have you ever used a Mac? It's a great example of what the iPhone will look like, in a few years. You boot it up, log in, and open up the App Store... and it's only junk. Freemium apps with monthly microtransactions, paid trial versions of professional software you have to buy from the web, iPhone games that are barely anything more than a casino with flashy graphics... these are the developers that choose to stay with Apple when they get the choice. They'll be your only bedfellows if you're dumb enough to use an iPhone that only Apple curates.
we had something like this. Environment was flaky and expectation was you run the test a few times till it passes.... as expected most developers who can issue put requests with curl or something would only need to "run" that test once
That's not how CI works? CI is the backend verifying that the tests pass, not that the developer has run the tests.
From what I understand, requiring developers to assert they run the tests and not run them again from a clean checkout before pushing to prod is likely a compliance problem (SOX, PCI, etc).
