Disadvantaged Students Stay In College If They're Told Everyone Struggles (arstechnica.com) 206
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Lower-income and minority college students often have trouble sticking with higher education. But past studies have indicated they would be less likely to drop out of school if they receive appropriate counseling once they start experiencing academic problems. A new study published in PNAS demonstrates that if students receive this kind of intervention prior to college enrollment and during their first year at college, they are more likely to avoid having academic trouble in the first place. And the counseling can be done over the Internet. The counseling involves letting students know that it is common for students to struggle with the transition to college and that this transition will get easier with time. This is known as a "lay theory intervention."
Tell them lies (Score:2, Interesting)
Everyone does not struggle. There are reasons you have difficulty--not that you're too stupid for college, or that the next guy has a better brain; it's that you're using the wrong methods, and you're entering an unfamiliar environment.
The brain, first and foremost, is an energy-hungry organ. To minimize energy usage, it restructures to readily follow the most common set of actions. Overriding this--self-activation or response-inhibition--requires first formulating a plan in the prefrontal cortex, the
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there are many other things that can cause people to struggle. There is your budget; roommates; not punching some asshole who desperately deserves it; whether to spend the weekend with the spelunking club or the skydiving club; do I go out with the blonde or the slightly less attractive redhead (okay, that's not a struggle, it's the redhead), when should I stop drinking in order to avoid getting my face written on with a sharpie (or worse).
That's stress. Stress is normal and healthy. Too much and unhealthy stress is often called "strain"; struggling implies failure to thrive.
You're not struggling just because life is hard; you're struggling because you can't keep up with life. For problems which are not intractable, we can fix the root cause.
I don't think everyone struggles with academics, though some would argue that if you aren't then you need a bigger load or a more difficult program.
Don't increase load to failure; increase load to capacity.
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Success in not necessarily about structure - I had less than zero structure studying and I still did fine academically.
That's not to say it would not help some others, or that it would not have improved my own work somewhat - I'm just saying structure is not required for everyone, and I suspect for some people such structure may be counter-productive.
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Some people have superior internal strategies--I'm one of those people; I always did great without structure because my brain internally dissects everything. Of particular note, I don't deal well with inconsistent data: when I have new knowledge, I compare it to all other knowledge I possess, and resolve any inconsistencies. This has lead to reasoning out information I haven't yet been given, or identifying when someone gave me a simplification of a concept which is just plain incorrect. The effect is
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Everyone does not struggle. There are reasons you have difficulty--not that you're too stupid for college, or that the next guy has a better brain; it's that you're using the wrong methods, and you're entering an unfamiliar environment.
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a lack of structured study skills or inability to manage time efficiently.
But there are also distinctive other problems that tend to be more common among "disadvantaged students," particularly those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Number one is probably the fact that many of these students simply have fewer resources than other college students. They are more likely to have to work part-time (even multiple part-time jobs) while taking classes, just to pay for school.
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Number one is probably the fact that many of these students simply have fewer resources than other college students. They are more likely to have to work part-time (even multiple part-time jobs) while taking classes, just to pay for school. They are more likely to have more complicated family responsibilities at a younger age, which also sucks up a lot of time.
I *know* I can fix that.
Other people depend on innate abilities that they don't have to think about. (And when I say "innate," I don't necessary mean they were born with it: I also include things that for whatever reason a talented kid may have figured out in processing the world when he/she was very young, and it's become so ingrained in the very way they think and process information that they are completely unaware of how different it is from other people.)
I'm one of those people, although I've taken it to an unhealthy extreme in some places. A *very* unhealthy extreme. It doesn't stack up to structured skills, but it does make people think I'm some kind of super-brain.
Getting my superior mind powers to fall over for the tiniest reason is pretty trivial. By far the most severe is the black box effect: I use an extreme form of analogical thinking which includes defining analogical boundaries (i.e. I specifically determine how t
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Different approaches work because of different internal translation layers and habitual thinking behaviors. All people learn best the same way; to cope with not being told how the brain functions and how learning works, people find various strategies which produce similar results.
Tailored approaches can lead to inefficient learning and, as a result, to the observation that some students are just dumber than other, more brilliant students. All students appear to learn best by adjusting the study strategy
If you think minorities have it tough... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I transferred from community college to university in 1994, I applied to the Equal Opportunity Program. Being a poor white boy who was the first person in his family to go to college, I got accepted into the program. The Latino guidance counselor told me not to bother with the tutoring resources, because, you know, I was white, and didn't need that much help, and to come back next year to renew the EO&P contract.
My first year in the university ended with my girlfriend and I breaking up, leaving me depress and on academic probation. I got called into the EO&P office to explain my situation to a different guidance counselor. She demanded to know why I listened to that "idiot" from the year before and not follow the program as laid out in the contract. I pointed out the contract language that specifically stated that I must do everything that the guidance counselors told me to do. That took the wind out of her sails. Either way, I got kicked out of the program and the university. Ironically, the academic probation policy changed the following year because 10% of the student body was at risk of being kicked out (typically, it's 3%), which was too much money for the university to let walk away, and many of those students stayed.
I never went back to the university. A decade later, I went back to community college to learn computer programming and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0GPA in my major. That was the beginning of my technical career.
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I'm mixed race but look white. Name gives it away. Anyway, I was put in remedial reading class due to an undiagnosed medical issue. I was reading to the teacher one day and he stopped me, because it was obvious I was bored. He asked me what sort of thing I liked to read at home, and I told him I was half way through Lord of the Rings and could I bring that in. He just stared at me dumbfounded for a bit, and then suggested some other uninteresting kids book. I was maybe 9 or 10 at the time I think.
That medic
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He just stared at me dumbfounded for a bit, and then suggested some other uninteresting kids book.
I had a similar incident with a library summer reading program as a kid. Read ten picture books during the summer. I did — in one day. The librarian called me a liar. She told me to fetch the books and recite each book word-for-word from memory. Most of these books had five words per picture page and 20 pages per book. I recited ~1,000 words perfectly. That made her madder. She held on to my reading certificate until the end of the program I would later graduate from the eighth grade with a college-l
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Shame. I spent a whole bunch of recesses actively discussing the Lord of the Rings and other fantasy novels with my sixth grade teacher. We had a never-ending argument about whether Lloyd Alexander's Fair Folk were elves, dwarves, both, or something else. One of the most inspirational teachers I had, up through college.
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One of the most inspirational teachers I had, up through college.
I had an English teacher in college who invited students to come to class on a Saturday morning for extra help. I showed up with three or four others. She put up a sentence and asked why the grammar was correct. I took a risk and told her it felt right, as I didn't know how to explain it otherwise. Grammar Nazis always punished me for not knowing the rules of grammar. She went with my feeling and built upon it. When the semester was over, I knew my grammar rules.
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You're a white male looking for help. You ARE a minority in that no programs exist to help you or cater for you. There's no minimum quotas for you, and no companies out there going out of their way to fast track you into their programs.
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For the majority of my contract jobs, I'm hired over the phone. Skin color doesn't come into play. If it ever did, I have a Mexican uncle as a personal reference. Having a Mexican uncle opens many doors, especially among Latinos.
You're lucky, twice. This is very real and I've experienced it first hand when I had pressure from upper management to employ a female Chinese girl to the engineering department purely on the basis that she was female, Chinese, and that's what was lacking. They didn't attend the interview, they didn't even read through their whole resume which if they did would have made them aware that she wasn't getting the job anyway, but in their eyes she was perfect for the role.
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You're lucky, twice.
Luck has nothing to do with it. I grew up in a multicultural environment where I can get along with everyone. I've never been denied or lost a job because of my race. The only time I suffered discrimination was when I worked at Cisco, where 95% of my coworkers were Indians, and, because of that, they only had vegan pizzas at company events. Pizza is not pizza unless it has some kind of meat on it.
They didn't attend the interview, they didn't even read through their whole resume which if they did would have made them aware that she wasn't getting the job anyway, but in their eyes she was perfect for the role.
Otherwise known as corporate dysfunction when HR has checkboxes to mark off.
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People think that community college is just a buffet they can graze at and they're doing good as long as they are taking 12 credit hours.
Most community colleges have been impacted by budget cuts, too many people demanding classes and too many classes being cancelled. It was bad after the dot com bust, but it was a lot worst after the Great Recession. The four-year degree, with or without community college, is no longer practical.
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Spoken like someone who has never taken their own advice. Community Colleges are tarpits with 25% transfer rates to a 4 year institution. The dropout rate is outrageous, and those who do transfer normally take 3-5 years to get there. When you look at the opportunity cost of delayed graduation by 1-3 years, the cost of community college far outweighs the tuition savings.
This reminds me of something I used to observe all the time, when I was living around people doing CC and/or the local state university...
They'd take 3+ years to finish that 2-year degree, then transfer, and it would still take them another 4 years to finish that university degree. What exactly did they save, over just doing the university degree from the start? Seemed like I'd almost never run into anyone who actually did the 2-year + 2 more at university, as such things are generally advertised.
Just major in EE (Score:2)
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I won't say you're wrong... because you're not. In the Engineering program at the university I went to, EE 221 was required for _ALL_ Engineering majors.
At the main campus (this was a university with 'satellite' campuses), it was taught in a huge lecture hall, 200+ students in there per class session, and if you fell behind, you were left behind. Roughly 15% of the class dropped it by the final drop/add day (either to take it next semester, or they would outright change majors), and roughly another 15% fail
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When I was at WUSTL (early '80s), EE 280 (?) was the washout class for engineers. Everyone who was an engineer had to take it.
For science majors, Organic Chemistry was often the washout class...
Can't remember the others...
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Holy crap, were you my instructor for the Into to E.E. class I had to take in '87? He told everyone to look to the left and right and say good-bye to them because they wouldn't be there at graduation. Low and behold, he was right. We started out with 120 and graduated 30.
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A few words go a long way (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm visually impaired, when I went into the Computer Systems Technology program at NAIT they hadn't really dealt with a visually impaired person before. The committee running the program at the time recommended I take semesters in halves so I wouldn't get overloaded. I took this advice and started during the summer intake. That first half semester was a bitch, they didn't have materials to help me along and the 13" monitors they had were brutal for my vision. Anyway, I got OK grades in most classes, but nothing great, in the introduction to programming I passed with a 65% (bare minimum pass) but I felt like it just wasn't for me. The instructor there at the time took me aside during one of the last days before the semester closed and told me that I had a lot of potential and that I should give it another try.
The next half-semester I re-took the introduction to programming, by now the program had purchased 17" monitors and my grade shot up 30%. Maybe it was finally having the equipment I needed, maybe it was taking the course for the second time but I know it was the words of encouragement that made me do labs as soon as I got them, try to work harder in other courses too, connecting the dots between them.
After that second half-semester I decided to go to normal semesters like everyone else and excelled. Turned out I was naturally gifted for problem solving and all sorts of other things that I didn't really think I was capable of.
Anyway I graduated in 1999 with a love of programming and a lot of confidence. Sometimes I wonder where I would have been now if I hadn't been given that little boost of encouragement from a person I respected, it's not easy to want to achieve things when you are a "minority" particularly when you have a disability because the deck is stacked against you, but then somebody tells you it doesn't matter and maybe the first time in my life I really believed it.
The trouble I see with poor kids (Score:3, Informative)
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Can't fix economic advantages (Score:5, Informative)
The only advantage I remember from college was the economic advantages some kids had.
It doesn't make more economically advantaged kids smarter, and many of them squander this advantage partying, but they also don't face the soul-sucking grind of a job or the soul-sucking money problems that come with it. And the job of course takes hours away, sometimes leaving you amotivated to study or flat-out with less hours to study.
None of this means it can be done, but it does make it harder. Harder still for those occasional emotional crises that arise in college -- a couple of bad grades, social problems, etc.
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It's not wealthy vs not wealthy, it's the typical middle class up vs poor minorities from communities that don't typically attend university.
Motivation and hard work comes from a belief that you can succeed. I was atrocious at the start of my first year programming course, but fortunately I was an intelligent middle class white guy, it was really obvious I could succeed with sustained effort because I could see a lot of intelligent middle class white guys with the same upbringing who had succeeded.
If I was
Re:Can't fix economic advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, assuming you don't have to worry about money is a big advantage in university. You can eat the right foods to help your body function properly. You don't have to work so you can devote more time to your studies.If you have extra money you can even pay for tutoring and other kinds of extra help to make sure your marks are good. You can live closer to campus so you have less travel time, which means that you can sleep or study more. Having a computer with a decent internet connection can also help thin
Way better than what my high school did (Score:2)
Which is tell us that nobody's going to be there for us every step of the way at college like at high school, that we have to prepare and take initiative as much as possible, that we have to think ahead of what we want to accomplish and pick the right courses, and that This Is Real Life so we'd better take it seriously and not slack off or fuck it up because nobody will be there to pick up the pieces. Well, to someone with anxiety issues and a mother who was saying at 18 I better be ready to move out, I did
managing expectations (Score:2)
If you tell college freshmen you're going to apply a "lay theory intervention" to them, you might find them a little disappointed with the result when you just talk.
You know what works better? (Score:2)
NOT coddling them.
Not doing this stupid "Everyone gets a trophy!"
Not trying to boost self-esteem with no effort required on the part of the kid ("Aw, you failed to say the alphabet, you're still smart, here's a prize for failing!")
People feel better when they think life is fair (Score:2, Interesting)
Some people just feel better when they learn that someone else is also doing badly. Studies have been made and it has been proven again and again.This new study, again, supports it.
Most famous empirical, yet cruel real life exercise took place in Soviet Russia in 1920-1930. They were building socialism, and anybody who was successful (irrespective of whether individual was loyal or not - that did not matter) was under the risk to be reported as a bourgeois government hater. Millions and millions people were
Anything that prevents first year dropouts is good (Score:3)
Look at this from a macroeconomic point of view. Especially in mid-tier large state universities (like the one I went to a million years ago,) it is super-common to have students fail out after their first year for a number of reasons. Some weren't meant to be there but get pushed in by the "everyone must go to college" rhetoric. Some fall prey to the Greek life or other constant party atmosphere and just neglect doing any work. Some aren't emotionally ready to handle the huge shot of independence they get. Whatever the reason, many (most?) of these students are paying for their education at least partially with loans that must be paid back regardless of the outcome. Going to college and not getting the degree is way worse than not going -- you get no benefits career-wise and are stuck with lifelong debt. Wouldn't it make sense to provide some help and encouragement, especially to a population that really is at a disadvantage?
The state university system I graduated from has something like this - extra help, remedial classes, etc. for truly disadvantaged students to try to give them a leg up, and keep them there once they've made it in. And they need it; going where I went, as a freshman you really are an anonymous number. It's a whole lot like dealing with a state agency in terms of personal attention and "customer service." It wasn't until I got into the end of sophomore year in a relatively small department that I started to lose that sense of anonymity. Going from a 4,000 student random freshman class to about 300 focused chemistry students with good faculty support was a big change. If I had been in the engineering school (~8,000 students) or business (10,000+) that would've been way different. Point being, Joe Random Freshman in a 300-person lecture class might be having a hard time, but have very little in the way of avenues to get help. I do feel that part of the value I got out of my degree was learning to do things for myself, deal with crappy bureaucracies without throwing up my hands, etc. It's allowed me to work for big companies with stupid rules and advance pretty far in my career compared to people who just whine and complain when things won't bend to their will.
Elite universities may have a different problem, in that you have people in the top 5% of their high school classes merging into a population where _everyone_ graduated at the top of their class. That said, elite universities have plenty of support in place...they just don't let you fall out of the club once you've made it in. Having that Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, whatever degree qualifies you for the rarified worlds of investment banking, management consulting and other professions that only hire Ivy League/elite university grads as part of their culture. After that, Easy Street for life, If you're smart, and work really hard in high school, the tuition you pay at any of those places is a worthwhile investment. If you're driven but not rich or super brilliant, going through the state system is still a very valid way to go.
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I think that's just the side effects of offshoring, outsourcing and the drive for companies to squeeze every penny out of every person they can. The problem that people are experiencing is that the number of jobs being affected by these trends is increasing quickly. There was a time, and I was around when this was true, that graduating from any college with any degree in any field was a guarantee that you would be able to start some sort of career with an entry level position. Now, the supply of college-edu
When the hole is too deep... (Score:2)
...just keep digging. Lie to yourself that eventually you'll get yourself out and everything will be ok.
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Re: When the hole is too deep... (Score:2)
Totally different situation. You did exactly what you're supposed to. Not everyone is capable of completing college. To lie to them and tell them everyone has the same trouble that they do is not the correct solution. Those people will just just out a year later even worse off financially and mentally then they would have had they not been lied to.
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Not everyone is capable of completing college.
I was the first person in my family to go to college. My parents did everything but kick me out of the house to prevent me from going to college, especially since I never went to high school. To them, I was a failure. I spent my first year collecting bottles and cans around campus to pay for books and classes. During my second year, I got a job at the college bookstore that I stayed at for three years. My parents didn't accept the fact that I was a "success" until I graduated from community college.
Those people will just just out a year later even worse off financially and mentally then they would have had they not been lied to.
If this
Eliminate skin color preferences. (Score:2)
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I know it's hard to believe, and for the longest time I actually thought this to have become outlawed, but there are allegedly still students in college trying to learn something rather than expecting something to be handed to them for crying "oppression".
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What? Are you nuts? The more of those "female studies" students, the better my job security!
The more students come out of colleges with degrees that are only useful when sitting on the can and the TP is gone, the higher my chances of not being replaced by a younger person, simply because my degree is known at HR to have some meaning while theirs ... well, not so much.
Sorry, my sympathy for the younger generation is gone. And my solidarity. Sucks to be you if you're under 25, for your degree ain't worth shit
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The first thing they told me about attendance when I went to college was literally "you paid to be here if you don't show up to classes we don't care, we have your money"
That sobered up a lot of people...
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I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
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I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
If that's true, you may have chosen poorly for college. (Either that, or you went to one of the most elite high schools with super high standards.)
Well, actually, I'm not going to say you chose poorly -- it's up to everyone to choose their own path. For me, in life I've found that I enjoy challenging myself more than just taking easy routes, particularly academically. If I showed up at a college and it was easier than my high school, I would have concluded that it wasn't worthwhile and would try to tra
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He also might not have pushed himself terribly hard in college. At my school there were 3 colleges with CIS programs and they varied dramatically in terms of difficulty and bullsh*t level. That's just one major out of in a continuum including Library Science and Electrical Engineering.
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If that's true, you may have chosen poorly for college. (Either that, or you went to one of the most elite high schools with super high standards.)
You honestly can't think of any other reasons besides those?
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I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
I hated grade school. Never went to high school. Spent four years in community college (two years for remedial, two years for associate degree). College was easier because I wanted to be there.
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Actually the issues that most students including minorities have is the increase freedom that college provides.
From Kindergarten - High School your academic life is tightly controlled. If you are missing from class then they send the police to bring you to class. If your grade dip from not doing homework teachers will put you in detention after school to get you to do your work.
College if you don't show up, the professor normally won't care, however you will not learn the material and fail the test then yo
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Took the words right out of my mouth. What was once satire is now full blown reality.
"You got that right. You see, according to Cocteau's plan... I'm the enemy. Because I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech, the freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of BBQ ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I wa
Re:The need to self-identify as 'disadvantaged' .. (Score:5, Interesting)
... is the very same need in telling oneself "I am weak, I can't stand on my own"
Maybe not. Maybe it means, "I need a little help getting started."
When I was an MIT undergrad way back in the late 60s, MIT was just beginning to try to identify high-potential students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds. They would be offered a preparatory summer session to prepare them for the rigors of freshman year. While there were some flaws in the initial execution, the program had some real successes.
There were a number of black kids brought in under this program, and they soon formed their own affinity group, the Black Students Union (BSU). (There were other similar groups for Chinese students, etc.) A year or so later, the BSU did something that has me respecting them to this very day.
MIT was offering four years of full scholarship for the disadvantaged students--- very generous indeed. The BSU went to the administration and said that one year is fine, to help students get started, but more than that is sending a message to the student that you're incapable of making it on your own. So here we have a minority group offered something for nothing, turning it down because they were wise enough to realize that it could be harmful in the long run. Hats off to them.
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MIT was offering four years of full scholarship for the disadvantaged students-.... The BSU went to the administration and said that one year is fine, to help students get started, but more than that is sending a message to the student that you're incapable of making it on your own.
There is another strategic angle to this approach: spreading the risk, and hopefully multiplying the reward. (4x) students get that opportunity to "get started" for the same money instead of just (x) students getting all four years. There will be more winners, all around.
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I think I got my copy from the Walmart bargain bin back in the day. Had no idea it would end up on the other side of the supply-demand curve. Although that happens more often than you might think.
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Wow, a Renaissance man, your uncle. He managed to compare apes and blacks and ALSO wedged an absentee father stab in there. Truly admirable. If he could work in something about laziness or stupidity in there he could go on tour with it.
If he's still around, I think Trump's legal team has an opening.
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Ooh, I love a good game of Pretend!
Is this the part where we all pretend that absentee fathers aren't actually a very serious problem in the black community, and are just some stereotype that evil white racists invented?
Guess we can forget about that honest dialogue about race, huh?
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One can be honest about problems in the black community and also make funny jokes. It's not the stereotypes that offend me, it's the utterly banal humor.
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Here in Norway it's only slightly over 100 years ago (1913) we decided women were competent enough to vote, today they outnumber and outperform us in higher education. Did genetics change like crazy in 3-4 generations? No. It's an attitude/culture problem, not a racial/genetic problem. Adopted kids from far away don't seem to be significantly different when raised by local parents in the local culture, I'm not sure it's 0% nature, 100% nurture but when it comes to things like this it's very close. Kids that
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Well yeah. There's not a good black variant for the term "white trash". If you criticize any black person you will probably have the race card thrown at you. Meanwhile, the black middle class is vibrant and thriving despite of the current racist narrative coming from "progressives".
The fact that they use a track & field competition for their narrative is hilarious...
Re: I thought the needed a safe space (Score:2)
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I took to college like a fish to water myself. It was high school that sucked ass.
I loved the freedom and the fact that the cro-magnon bullies were, for the most part, gone (redneck idiots and ghetto thugs usually don't make it to college). To me it was like breathing for the first time. I never really learned anything in high school (except which bullies to avoid). But college was a learning paradise! And the parties were much better too. And I didn't have to live at home and listen to my parents anymore!
S
Re: When everyone succeeds, no one does (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullock's! Leaning to ask you help is part of maturing. Know when you need help is very important. Knowing others feel the same pressure makes asking for help less awkward.
If you think you did it alone you are the one with the problem.
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Agreed. Most of the people who I knew in college who needed any sort of extra counseling or hand-holding were people who probably shouldn't have been in college to begin with. Of course, that was back in a time when it was okay to NOT go to college, and kids were actually honestly told that not everyone belonged in college. These days, every kid, no matter how stupid or ill-equipped for college, has to be told that he's a special snowflake who can do anything and everything.
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What do you expect from a society that rewards attendance as if it was some kind of achievement to drag your body somewhere? We can't subject those fragile child souls to the experience of failure, can we? So let's reward them even if they suck and blow at the same time. Hurray, everyone's a winner!
And then we wonder why this creates entitled assholes who think the world owes them anything.
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Especially if you phrase it in such a convoluted way. What the hell are you trying to say?
Re: So, a little encouragement can go a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: So, a little encouragement can go a long way (Score:4, Interesting)
The poor and disadvantaged don't have relatives that have made it through college. They don't know anyone to encourage them generally because the people they know have no experience with university. Many won't even realize the kids they think are doing great are struggling as hard as they are. Study groups can help this if they join them and most don't but it's better to be told by someone that's done it that it was hard for everyone, not just them.
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The poor and disadvantaged don't have relatives that have made it through college. They don't know anyone to encourage them generally because the people they know have no experience with university. Many won't even realize the kids they think are doing great are struggling as hard as they are. Study groups can help this if they join them and most don't but it's better to be told by someone that's done it that it was hard for everyone, not just them.
Exactly! Finally someone who gets it.
Re:So, a little encouragement can go a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we are going to write, "Stick to it. Never give up" 100 times...or tell them that 100 times.
Really, that's called encouragement and leadership. The Armed Forces do it all the time. Coaches do it for their teams.
Re:So, a little encouragement can go a long way (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, and in this case it's extra effective because the rest of the time they are getting lots of little subtle cues telling them that they are going to fail. Being followed around shops by the security staff, the look of mild surprise when someone finds out they are in college, the lack of interest from former teachers who seem to have decided they were going to fail anyway.
When they start to struggle it's easy to think, somewhat subconsciously, that the signs where there all along and they aren't cut out for this. Just pointing out that most people are in the same boat, that they are actually pretty normal, goes a long way.
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99% of Undergrad is college professors telling you that you are going to fail in the hope that you will drop out and lower their work load. This usually doesn't stop until your senior year when they have actually put enough time into your education that they stop trying to get you to quit.
Re: So, a little encouragement can go a long way (Score:3)
Don't forget the profs telling them that the system rigged against them and that some mystery "they" are racist out to oppress them.
When the message you are getting every day is that your efforts are in vain, anyone would become discouraged.
colleges are loaded with fuff and filler clases (Score:2)
colleges are loaded with fluff and filler classes that we can do without and some of them are in a way a joke for some.
big lecture classes where it can all be about cramming for the test.
classes that are not part of the Major but are forced where people cheat.
I heard about this art class where some turned in papers saying art is cool art is grate but for the finale they turned in a plagiarized paper.
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Maybe these lower class and minorities would do better in an apprenticeship role,
so that they can be replaced by a robot within the next twenty years.
The easiest jobs to automate are not necessarily those requiring less education. In fact, knowledge intensive jobs may fall first. Medical radiologists are already being replaced with computer image analysis and/or doctors in India. Robots help with surgery. A lot of legal work is being automated (or offshored). Medical diagnosis may be easier to automate than repairing a leaky faucet.
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Being replaced with a robot is something that is a more likely fate for a lawyer or a manager than a plumber.
Ok, it won't be a robot but rather a small script, but still.
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what won't be replaced by a robot in 20 years?
maybe if apprenticeships for robotics were common we would have jobs replaced in 15 years instead.
I doubt you'll see robots in mechanics and auto garages or the the trades (which is where most apprenticeships apply their focus where I'm from) anytime soon. Robots may be good at making shit but they ain't too great at fixing them (yet)
Re:high school mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
It's particularly hard at the elite universities. Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
And now, their peer group consists of people who have gone through exactly the same experiences. The people teaching them are going to assume "brilliance" as a default and anything short of that as a failure. Only a tiny handful of them - and generally those who are prepared to forgo almost all of the other pleasures of college life - will manage to rise back to that "academic elite" status. For the rest, they will, for probably the first time in their lives, need to get accustomed to being in the middle, or even near the bottom of their peer group. That is a major, and difficult, self-image adjustment.
I remember going through it myself. It wasn't until my third year at university that I contented myself with the fact that I wasn't going to be among the top tier of my year-group and, more to the point, that I didn't actually need to be in order to have a perfectly good career after graduation. Ironically, the very top-tier were generally those aiming to enter academia themselves, which was definitely not on my agenda.
Compared to some of my contemporaries, I adjusted fairly well. I got to see a few spectacular self-destructions.
Re:high school mentality (Score:5, Interesting)
Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
I think a lot of times the problem for disadvantaged students is that while they were in the top 5% of their class or whatever, when they get to university they discover that the top 5% of their class was performing like the 75th percentile compared with a lot of their new peers. The shock isn't so much that there are a lot of other high performing kids there (though that's going to happen too); the shock for the disadvantaged kids is that what they thought was high performing is actually closer to just barely average.
Re:high school mentality (Score:4, Interesting)
the shock for the disadvantaged kids is that what they thought was high performing is actually closer to just barely average
That's what he is saying and every single person there is experiencing the same thing. Every person present was extremely highly performing in their high school class and are now distributed around the new (much higher) average. The level of performance didn't really change much, but the average is now based on the subset of very high performers. The only difference is their ranking relative to their peers.
In fact, if the disadvantaged students are finding themselves at the 75th percentile of all highly performing students, then their "disadvantage" was really more of an advantage. They're significantly outperforming most of their "advantaged" peers.
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>Ironically, the very top-tier were generally those aiming to enter academia themselves
How is that ironic? It's certainly exactly what I would expect - with a severely limited spread of aptitudes, the academic top tier is naturally going to belong to those most dedicated to academia.
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Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
Though I gather the picture can be rosier elsewhere in the world.
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Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
I know this is probably obvious, but for some people, money isn't everything. Also, until recent decades, going to college wasn't about maximizing lifelong profits either. (This is a big misperception of correlation vs. causation: a century or more ago, aristocrats who already had wealth sent their kids to college because that's what rich people did; at some point people made the incorrect assumption that college made people rich, rather than the reality which is that most college students were rich befor
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The parents of those kids, who got accustomed to their kids' "academic elite" status through twelve years of schooling, will also have to adjust to the fact that their children are no better than average in their new environment. Lay off the kid FFS, stop treating a "B" like it's an "F", and realize that they'll do OK in life if they manage to graduate.
Kids also need to be taught how to cope with parents who still act like a "B" is equivalent to an "F".
Meh, that is what university is for... (Score:2)
To educate, culture, and generally grow up.
I went though it, but so do most people. As smart as you might think you are, it is a big world out there. I was always near the top of my class in high school, however one thing that probably helped me, was that I had a sister that consistently did even better, so I always had that sort of competition.
I also saw some crash and burn, particularly in year one.
As much as people think University is for smart people, it really isn't. Sure you can't be a dummy, and need
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Re:high school mentality (Score:5, Informative)
'scuse me, but calling a US college an "ocean with nothing but sharks", don't ever dare studying in Europe. Over here, nobody holds your hand. Nobody is dependent on your money, so they don't give half a shit about whether you drop out. Actually, you dropping out means less work with pesky students and more time to dedicate to research, so the sooner you drop out the better.
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At my university the majority of students drop out at one time. Usually within the first 2-4 semesters, simply because they're used to school spoon feeding them not only information but where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there, what material they should bring along,... university is vastly different.
First challenge: Find out what courses you have at all, where they are and what the fuck is going on.
Second challenge: Get one of the 30 spots that roughly 100 people vie for
Hint: Only i
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It's okay. That was over 30 years ago. Let it go, man. Just let it go.
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It's okay. That was over 30 years ago. Let it go, man. Just let it go.
But I don't want to be a special snowflake! ;)
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So you read the clickbait before it was cool.
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Yeah. I can relate to that. My AP teacher filled my head full of nonsense my senior year in HS. That lead to a horrible shock once I got to college. Although this is really about first generation students. They have no frame of reference and can't get it from their family. If they are lucky, their families aren't committing active sabotage.
Real life is brutal and unfair.