How good are American universities? How can you tell?
In a well-documented article for the New York Times Kevin Carey explains that Americans lag the world in education. Receiving a degree is
not the same thing as receiving an education.
Carey evaluates the evidence fairly, but this requires him to
lead us through a series of studies, tests and evaluations.
It is true, he explains, that America has some of the
greatest institutions of higher learning. But, that is for the 1%. When you
look at the rest of the educational system, and especially how well educated
Americans are, the results are far less sanguine.
It’s fine, Carey says, to rate universities by the number of
Nobel laureates on their faculties, but if you test students and graduates
themselves, you discover that they cannot compete with their peers around the
world.
He writes:
The
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example,
periodically administers an exam called PISA to 15-year-olds in 69 countries.
While results vary somewhat depending on the subject and grade level, America
never looks very good. The same is true of other international tests. In PISA’s
math test, the United States battles it out for last place among developed
countries, along with Hungary and Lithuania.
America’s
perceived international dominance of higher education, by contrast, rests
largely on global rankings of top universities. According to a recent ranking by
the London-based Times Higher Education, 18 of the world’s top 25 universities
are American. Similarly, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, published annually
by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gives us 19 of 25.
The Organization for Economic and Commercial development has
tested adults around the world. The results, for America, are not encouraging.
Carey reports:
The
project is called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult
Competencies (known as Piaac, sometimes called “pee-ack”). In 2011 and
2012, 166,000 adults ages 16 to 65 were tested in the O.E.C.D. countries (most
of Europe along with the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and South
Korea) and Cyprus and Russia.
Like
PISA, Piaac tests people’s literacy and math skills. Because the test takers
were adults, they were asked to use those skills in real-world contexts. They
might, for example, be asked to read a news article and an email, each
describing a different innovative method of improving drinking water quality in
Africa, and identify the sentence in each document that describes a criticism
common to both inventions. The test also included a measure of “problem-solving
in technology-rich environments,” reflecting the nature of modern work.
When the test was limited to college graduates, America did
not fare very much better:
Only 18
percent of American adults with bachelor’s degrees score at the top two levels
of numeracy, compared with the international average of 24 percent. Over
one-third of American bachelor’s degree holders failed to reach Level 3 on the
five-level Piaac scale, which means that they cannot perform math-related tasks
that “require several steps and may involve the choice of problem-solving
strategies.” Americans with associate’s and graduate degrees also lag behind
their international peers.
American
results on the literacy and technology tests were somewhat better, in the sense
that they were only mediocre. American adults were eighth from the bottom in
literacy, for instance. And recent college graduates look no better than older
ones. Among people ages 16 to 29 with a bachelor’s degree or better, America
ranks 16th out of 24 in numeracy. There is no reason to believe that American
colleges are, on average, the best in the world.
Why does it matter? Because of what it portends for the
international labor market.
We should worry less about government-mandated minimum wage
levels and ask ourselves how much value an American worker can add to an
enterprise. If, as Carey suggests, an undereducated American worker will add
less value than a foreign worker, corporations will have an incentive to move
jobs overseas. Why pay higher wages to workers who cannot make a concomitant contribution to their companies?
He concludes:
This
reality should worry anyone who believes — as many economists do — that
America’s long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human
capital. The relatively high pay of American workers will start to erode as
more jobs are exposed to harsh competition in global labor markets. It will be
increasingly dangerous to believe that only our K-12 schools have serious
problems.
5 comments:
And yet some still say our schools have not been dumbed down.
A refinement would be to administer the test to university professors. Then we could see where the poor instruction is occurring in those that are successful in college matriculation.
Perhaps such testing of adults could be associated with their colleges to see if there are statistical anomalies that reveal universities to be avoided.
"It is true, he explains, that America has some of the greatest institutions of higher learning. But, that is for the 1%."
Depends what is meant by "the 1%." If it means top 1% in family wealth and status, the statement is certainly incorrect. One can get a very good education at a large number of colleges throughout America, and one can get a pretty mediocre education at Harvard (where the grading standards are apparently pretty lax once you get in.)
The determining factor on quality of education received in college will very largely be a function of how good one's K-12 education was, AND the work ethic or lack of same picked up from one's parents and peers.
It is true that there is a significant % of people who do have the basic skills to do college work and who don't learn much while there, and perhaps could and would have given a more coherent curriculum and more inspired teaching. But their failure has little to do with not being in "the 1%" in economic terms.
"It is true, he explains, that America has some of the greatest institutions of higher learning. But, that is for the 1%. "
I was educated at MIT. It is certainly one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. But I was not in the 1% when I attended, nor is their student body mostly in the 1% now (presuming you mean American 1% and not world 1%).
Manufacturing and assembly are slowly returning to the U.S. because quality control is extremely difficult to maintain on overseas factories and asssembly plants.
For all the supposed faults of U.S. workers, they tend to show up for the job and take pride in doing their job correctly.
Post a Comment