Higher Education, Part IV

This is the fourth (final) part of a series related to higher education costs. (See Part I, Part II, Part III, and also check out the president’s speech offering to help that led to this long and emphatic “no thank you.”)

The original government interference in higher education is the refusal to allow businesses to use their own hiring policies. While I think IQ tests are limited in many ways—they fail to measure life experience combined with drive—they are significantly useful in predicting job performance in many fields. This is from 2002:

Cognitive ability tests represent the best single predictor of job performance, but also represent the predictor most likely to have substantial adverse impact on employment opportunities for members of several racial and ethnic minority groups.[1]

What happened was, it became “unconstitutional” for businesses to use an extremely useful colorblind tool in hiring decisions, because the results might end up appearing to be racist. So businesses found another way—they let higher education institutions do the IQ testing, and subsequent weeding out, for them.

As a result, getting an education at a premier university that would provide the same cachet as a high IQ score became the path to career success. And students were willing to pay a premium for that credential.

Costs for the coveted scarce commodity rose. Fewer students could work their way through college. So government stepped in to “help” with guaranteed student loans (which may not be low interest, and cannot be dismissed even in cases of bankruptcy or disability). More students with apparent financial ability to go to college meant greater demand for limited college admittance, which meant ever higher education costs. Current costs for a degree in many mid-range skills far outpace wages. The result is essentially indentured servitude.

Incidentally, schools are rated by the percentage of students they accept compared to how many apply—so they recruit so that they have more to turn away—which makes them more exclusive, literally, so they can then charge higher tuition. [I’ll refer you again to the Uncommon Knowledge discussion I mentioned in Part II.] Some of the ultimate schools, such as Harvard, take in so much money, they have literally billions of dollars in their permanent endowment fund. They could expand easily and offer the education to greater and greater numbers. Or they could provide full-ride scholarships to all their students for the next century—just off interest, without touching principal. But they don’t do that, because being exclusive, more than offering an excellent education for the next generation, is their business.

So now the president, who can do nothing about the third or half of high school students who fail to graduate, offers to step in to make sure everyone (sweepingly including the dropouts) gets a higher education. The premise is that a college education is the passport to a comfortable middle class lifestyle, and that should be available to everyone. It’s hard to argue with the “everybody should have the same opportunity” concept. But logic holds that there will always be a lower 50%; speaking it out of existence isn’t going to work. (I’m thinking of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average,” even though that’s not mathematically possible.)

If you know how to translate the president, you know he doesn’t really care about basic fairness—or else he’d be in favor of the free market. Power mongers grasp opportunities to be the deciders of who gets access to a certain level of lifestyle.

If the government is “helping” to make higher education opportunities, then of course it will have an interest in what is taught and how. So that means greater control over accreditation. Accreditation now is done by private entities, but does indeed have a certain point of view. For example, an accredited law school is required to teach not only that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land but that it was a correct Supreme Court decision—even though hardly anyone believes that, including the liberal members of the current SCOTUS. Accreditation is not a guarantee of education quality; it is a controller of documentation used for granting or denying access to opportunities.

Having more government influence on accreditation and other markers of success can only lead to weeding out dissenting opinions. And that is likely the intent.

Government could also affect choices by limiting use of student loans to those institutions it approves, thus limiting choice.

I am not in favor of encouraging diploma mills. I am in favor of my own children, at this point, getting their degrees from good universities—because right now that is still the gate to certain career advantages.

But, unlike our president, I trust the free market. If businesses were allowed to make hiring decisions their way, and students were free to get their education any way they chose (probably a combination of guided university education and much free online study), then costs would dramatically drop. Then hard work, effort combined with good character would be the gateway to success—rather than agreement with a tyrannical, interfering government.

---

[1] Murphy, K.M., “Can Conflicting Perspectives on the Role of g in Personnel Selection Be Resolved?” Human Performance, 15(1&2):173-186 (2002).

What Makes IQ So Racist?

I read Walter Williams’ piece yesterday on education being worse than we think. Some of the comments afterward were disturbing to me. I know—never take those seriously. But I thought maybe info here would be a good antidote nevertheless. 

Williams’ commentary points out that there is indeed a white/black gap in educational success. It’s safer for him to say such things than for many, since he is black. He and his friend Thomas Sowell are two of the most brilliant economists I frequently refer to, because they not only understand so much, they can explain information simply enough for all of us to use. So my personal belief is that it isn’t skin color, or evolution, that causes significant IQ deficiency for a particular race. So, if the gap actually exists (and data makes that fairly certain), then I propose there must be some cause other than race itself. 

Heredity does have something to do with IQ, but not as much as you might think. Without appropriate inputs, a brain doesn’t build the complex connections necessary to qualify as high IQ. Advantageous inputs start very early. 

One contributor is attention from the mother. A mother who breastfeeds for at least six months (a year is better) provides some crucial inputs. She looks at her baby’s face, and the baby looks at her, focusing on her facial features—one of the first fascinations of a baby. And she provides the baby this input first on one side and then the other. This is essential. When we feed a baby with a bottle, we tend to hold the baby in the arm most comfortable to us (often based on whether we’re right or left handed). And we feed the whole bottle to the baby on that side—giving him or her only one view. The brain doesn’t develop both sides as well without the long hours of staring into each other’s eyes from both perspectives. 

Babies allowed to crawl on the floor at will, rather than being upright in a walker with wheels, develop cross-patterning that organizes the brain in a way that is essential for reaching full potential. In fact, it has been shown that when older children are identified with reading difficulties such as dyslexia, if they spend time every day getting down on the floor and doing a combat crawl, they can make a year or two of reading advancement over a summer without spending any time reading. 

The brain is changed by appropriate inputs, using frequency, intensity, and duration. So, it isn’t surprising that children who receive a lot of attention from their own mothers, particularly in the development years up until school age, are likely to have an IQ up to 30 points higher than a child who receives less attention, as in a non-nurturing daycare, or set for hours in front of a television. Children who get played with and read to tend to be smarter. Parents who do these behaviors tend to be better educated and value both their child and the child’s development.  

So intellectually successful parents tend to produce more intellectually successful children. In itself, this isn’t racial. But it can appear to be so. Black families are much more likely to be broken, fatherless homes, with single mothers working long hours away from their children, and without money to provide care that would substitute for stay-at-home mother care. 

When we add the superior results for Asian children, we might continue to think something racial is going on. Asian children often succeed educationally even when they come from poor immigrant families. But is that caused by evolutionary racial differences? Not necessarily; there are cultural differences in play.  

There are differences between rice cultures and wheat cultures. Rice is an intense crop in which continual meticulous care yields larger crops—weeding, measuring the exact right amount of irrigation water. That is not so much true with wheat—even though I would never say farming of any kind is not a lot of work. But with wheat, there is a long wait between sowing time and harvest time. There may be a continual need for irrigation, but daily weeding probably doesn’t change the crop yield too much; the wheat and occasional weed can grow up together and be separated after harvest. The climate of a rice culture might allow planting year round. Wheat tends to grow in climates with a harsher winter, so there is down time. 

These differences affect culture in specific ways. Rice culture people tend to work hard with the certain belief that it will pay off; and they tend to have greater perseverance than non-rice cultures. They expect hard work from their children as well, and their children actually do put in more hours on their schooling. (Anecdotal note: my daughter-in-law is from a rural farming community; much of this semi-tropical area has been dedicated to rice growing, including where our subdivision is located. She tells me that in her school, she noticed that some of the smartest kids were from rice-farming families--whatever their race.) 

So, if we’re looking at why blacks tend to get a seriously inferior education, or, put another way, are much less likely to succeed educationally, what do we know is likely to help?

• Intact families, especially with lots of time with a dedicated mother particularly from birth to age 5.
• Educational stimulation in the home, with plenty of appropriate brain development time.
• Appropriate brain stimulation, including frequency, intensity, and duration when there has been a lack during development.
• A family culture that values education, hard work, and perseverance.

Giving up on an entire race is not acceptable. What will not work? More money spent per student when the above list is not met. Since what we’ve been doing doesn’t work, we have to come up with an alternative—something that doesn’t tempt teachers to illegally change test results. Everything on the list is doable within a family, without government money. Here’s something we could try: teach (and support with culture) the importance—to themselves and their posterity—of waiting until marriage to have sex, waiting beyond teenage years to get married, choosing someone to marry who shares your values and goals and then staying married to that person, and getting all you can out of a high school education and any other education you can succeed at. This is the formula for avoiding poverty in America, and it’s a good start at preventing poverty and providing high IQ for your children. 

If you want to know more about the brain research I mentioned here, I suggest www.NACD.org (National Association for Child Development—particularly their 7-hour audio guide for parents); The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge; Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, by Daniel Amen; and Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell.