MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘ACT’

Sports DEI

Posted by M. C. on May 30, 2023

              One last thing. DEI has all but banned ACT and SAT scores in academia. Why? That is because certain demographic groups do better, far better, than other demographic groups. Nor has this “gap” narrowed, despite heroic efforts for this to be done on the part of the wokists. What solution have the politically correct forces instituted to deal with this obvious injustice? Why, of course, to ban ACT and SAT scores in academia.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/124469799

WALTER BLOCK

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been sweeping the nation. It has been applied to all sorts of institutions, albeit, preeminently, education. It is time, it is past time, that this initiative be spread out, even further. To wit, it should be introduced into the realm of sports.

              According to DEI, the reason whites do better at earning wealth, educational attainment, employment, more stable families, incarceration rates, STEM occupations, etc., has nothing to do with ability, IQ levels, studiousness, work ethic, or anything else of that sort. Rather, it is all due to white racism. It is a little difficult to reconcile that claim with the undeniable fact that Orientals outstrip Occidentals in most of these dimensions, but let that pass. We do not want to assess DEI theory too harshly here. Instated, we want to apply it to the realm of athletics.

              How would that work? First, let us consider professional basketball.

              The percentage of black players is 73%, while they comprise only some 13% of the overall population. Whites make up 17% of these splendid athletes, but 76% of the total population. Asians? They comprise 0.4% of the NBA but 6% of all people in the US. Thus, blacks are highly overrepresented, while whites and Orientals are significantly underrepresented.

              How can we account for these statistics? According to the DEI philosophy it has nothing to do with the fact that “white men can’t jump.” Rather, the culprit here, wait for it, I hope you’re sitting down while you read this, is black racism. Caucasians and Asians have just as much ability, on average, as do Africans and African Americans, but the latter just won’t allow them into the game to the degree that their abilities would warrant. Black athletes are just mean spirited. These world class sports pros are in effect hogging the ball. True, virtually all of the teams are owned by whites and as per usual, the buck stops at the top. But we’re going to ferret out black racism wherever it lies, with neither fear nor favor, and according to the DEI principles, it rests squarely with this demographic.

              A similar analysis applies to football, where the players, disproportionately to their share of the total population, favor blacks (71%) over whites (25%). Data for track and field, marathon running is harder to come by, but eyeball experience indicates that blacks are keeping whites at “the back of the bus” to an even greater extent in these activities too.

              However, when it comes to swimming and hockey (93% white), matters reverse. Here, at last, we find the evils of “white supremacy.” There are hardly any blacks with important accomplishments in either venue. This of course has nothing to do with black disinterest or lack of ability in either sport. No, we again utilize the DEI premise that all races are equally able in all dimensions. Expert economist Thomas Sowell says otherwise, over and over again, with evidence you could knock an elephant over with, but what does he know? If there are any differences in success rates it must necessarily be due to racism. Anyone who denies this is himself a racist. QED.

              What are we then to make of the fact that too few basketball and football coaches are of African descent? Only seven out of 29 head NBA coaches were black last year. According to National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts “These numbers are just disgraceful…” But seven out of 29 is 24% roughly double the percentage of the black population. What is going on here? The craziness of DEI is going on here. This is true not only at the professional level, but includes college teams as well.

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Watch “Woke Colleges vs Testing” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on March 31, 2021

Colleges are ending SAT/ACT tests in the name of diversity, despite research that shows they are good at predicting college success. —- Don’t miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1​ —- Some schools now won’t even look at applicants’ test scores. The reason: richer kids may get tutoring, and some minority groups, on average, don’t score as well. Bob Schaeffer of the advocacy group FairTest compares test-makers to “the tobacco industry.” He’s winning his war against testing. More than half of colleges in the country are now test-optional. “The test makers themselves admit that the SAT and ACT are inferior predictors of college performance [to grades],” Schaeffer tells me. But here’s the data: high school grades predict 33% of college grades, while tests predict 32%. Not very “inferior!” Using both grades and SATs predicts 42% of college success. A University of California report found that this trend holds across all races and income levels: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/424154/…​ In other words, tests are useful predictors of college success and failure. Yet university administrators didn’t follow the faculty report’s recommendations. Why? Diversity and political correctness. “It really is about making these campuses look right,” says Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “…using them to make your college catalog look more colorful… It’s about aesthetics. It’s not about learning.” I ask: “What’s wrong with these schools saying we want a more diverse student body?” “How you achieve it is what I take issue with,” Riley says. “There’s this assumption. We just get these kids in the door. They’ll be fine. They’ll do okay. No, they won’t! … they’re being set up to fail.” To really increase diversity, Riley says, support school choice and charter schools that succeed in preparing disadvantaged kids for college.

https://youtu.be/WT-8z-sAx5Y

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Correct Diagnostics Needed – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 20, 2020

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/walter-e-williams/correct-diagnostics-needed/

By Walter E. Williams

You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going to have your abdominal pain.

The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, “White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.” In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.

“Below basic” is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night’s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.

In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.” It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.” Agresti writes: “Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 53% of the 16,000 murder victims.” The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018. For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats.

According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today’s discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community.

The Best of Walter E. Williams Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

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How To Fix College Admissions – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 27, 2020

We do not want government run newspapers or television stations. They should function as checks and balances against an overweening public sector, e.g., totalitarianism. But exactly the same principle applies to higher education. None of these institutions can accomplish this role under the thumb of government.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/walter-e-block/how-to-fix-college-admissions/

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First we separate all institutions of higher learning into two categories. In one, we include those that are purely private, which accept no direct subsidies from government whatsoever; in the other, all the rest.

Into the first classification we place Hillsdale College, Michigan; Grove City College, Pennsylvania; University of San Francisco, California; Christendom College, Virginia; Pensacola Christian College, Florida; Patrick Henry College, Virginia; Wyoming Catholic College, Wyoming; Gutenberg College, Oregon; Yeshiva Toras Chaim Talmudic Seminary of Denver, Colorado; Biola University, California; Bob Jones University, South Carolina, Goldsboro Christian Schools, North Carolina. There may be a few more, but not too many.

What should be our perspective on the admissions policies of universities in this first, private category? They may do exactly as they please. We live, hopefully, in a free country, and freedom means the right to inaugurate your own policies, provided, only, that you do not violate the rights of others. No one has any right to be enrolled in any of these places without the permission of their owners. That would constitute trespass. High up on the list of liberty is freedom of association. These colleges should admit whoever they choose, with no non-discrimination requirements imposed upon them at all. They may use SAT and ACT to their heart’s content. Or not.

What of the remaining 99.99% of universities in the country which are directly subsidized, or owned outright, by the state? While private persons and schools should be free to discriminate, the same does not apply to government or quasi governmental institutions. They should not be allowed to discriminate on any basis whatsoever. For example, the controversial ACT and SAT tests should be forbidden to them as admission criteria.  These discriminate, mainly, between people with high and low IQs. It is intolerable for a state or state-related institution to make such an invidious distinction. After all, the government does not impose intelligence tests on those it admits to its buses, trains, libraries, parks, hospitals, museums, art galleries, concert halls, zoos, sports arenas, beaches, etc. In some countries, the government owns the airlines; in Canada, PetroCan owned a string of gas stations. No intelligence requirement was obligatory for service from these state institutions either.

This non-discrimination policy should apply not only to admissions, but also to grading. Enrolling students who can hardly read, write or do math will not suffice, for with any such system they will soon fail out. Other public institutions, see above, have no such grading systems, which would remove the intellectually non-gifted after a while. There is simply no justification for doing so in education either. This is NOT satire. I am very serious about this. These recommendations follow, logically, from the premise that it is and should be unlawful for government to discriminate against the intellectually challenged.

Of course, this would spell the ruination of these public universities. At present, the following US institutions are highly ranked in terms of prestige: University of California , Los Angeles; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of North Carolina , Chapel Hill; University of Virginia; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Texas, Austin; University of Florida; University of Georgia; University of California, Berkeley; Indiana University.  So are these ostensibly “private” ones: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, Duke, Hopkins. Many of these are highly ranked in world compilations. Were freedom instituted, none of this would be true any longer. Smart students would no longer enroll due to the intellectual diversity of open admission. Accomplished professors would go elsewhere.

Would that be a detriment to this modest proposal? Of course not. If these universities wished to retain the prestige they presently justifiably enjoy, they will have to eschew all direct government grants (the relation between the state and their students is entirely a different matter, and an irrelevant one). But this is precisely the goal of the freedom philosophy. The desiderata is not only separation of church and state, but, also, separation of education and state. We do not want government run newspapers or television stations. They should function as checks and balances against an overweening public sector, e.g., totalitarianism. But exactly the same principle applies to higher education. None of these institutions can accomplish this role under the thumb of government.

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Fraud in Higher Education – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on December 4, 2019

Here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years: “What If Harry Potter Is Real?” “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame,” “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “Learning from YouTube,” “How To Watch Television,” and “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” The questions that immediately come to mind are these: What kind of professor would teach such courses, and what kind of student would spend his time taking such courses? Most importantly, what kind of college president and board of trustees would permit classes in such nonsense?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/walter-e-williams/fraud-in-higher-education/

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This year’s education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, “More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.” Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science).

It’s clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, “Good Grieve! America’s Grade Inflation Culture,” published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation’s leading colleges was A-minus. For example, the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), University of California, Berkeley (3.59).

The falling standards witnessed at our primary and secondary levels are becoming increasingly the case at tertiary levels. “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is a study conducted by Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They found that 45% of 2,300 students at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.”

An article in News Forum for Lawyers titled “Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent” cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75% of two-year college students and 50% of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20% of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30% of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in “basic English.”

Here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years: “What If Harry Potter Is Real?” “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame,” “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “Learning from YouTube,” “How To Watch Television,” and “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” The questions that immediately come to mind are these: What kind of professor would teach such courses, and what kind of student would spend his time taking such courses? Most importantly, what kind of college president and board of trustees would permit classes in such nonsense?

The fact that unscrupulous parents paid millions for special favors from college administrators to enroll their children pales in comparison to the poor educational outcomes, not to mention the gross indoctrination of young people by leftist professors.

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Tough Testing – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on October 17, 2019

This country needs to reform testing, to get it back to doing the job it did fairly well in the past. But few are interested in discussing how to fix testing because that would require honesty, which tends to get you canceled these days.

Of course, Asians get, by far, the highest test scores of all, and have been widening the gap in this century…They tend to confuse The Narrative.

https://www.takimag.com/article/tough-testing/

by Steve Sailer

One of the less remarked-upon gender gaps is in college attendance: Young men have fallen far behind young women. Males now make up only 43 percent of college students despite continuing to earn slightly higher average scores on college admission tests.

Perversely, journalist Paul Tough’s much-praised new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, calls for America to worsen this inequality by dumping the SAT and ACT for being biased toward boys.

To Tough, college entrance examinations are just another conspiracy to make white boys look good.

One important fact that Tough points out is that prestigious colleges have vastly more money to spend per student than do less famous colleges. Although list-price tuitions at private colleges are virtually the same (and the average private student now gets a 51 percent discount as “financial aid”), the famous colleges receive immensely larger gifts, so they have far more to lavish upon their students.

Consider Harvard (which, perhaps not coincidentally, took the lead in developing the modern testing system in the 1930s and 1940s).

In 2013, the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust (or Doctor Faust), announced a $6.5 billion fundraising goal, the most ambitious campaign in higher-education history. But when it was over, Harvard had raised $9.6 billion. (It’s almost as if Harvard is adept at picking applicants who, decades later, will write giant checks to Harvard.)

So, in the unlikely event that you get a chance to go to Harvard rather than to Directional State U., you might well consider it. For example, if you run into a rough patch, Harvard has the resources to help you avoid flunking out. And if you are thriving intellectually, Harvard has all sorts of delightful amenities for the best minds.

In turn, some lucrative careers such as consulting and investment banking don’t recruit much at non-rich colleges…

By the way, this history suggests one reason Harvard gives advantages in admission to legacies and athletes in minor sports. I strongly suspect that donors who write eight-figure checks to Harvard tend to be some combination of:

(1) Son of a Harvard grad;

(2) Did well on his SAT;

(3) Competed on a minor sports team like rowing or squash; and

(4) Now wants his daughter or son to go to Harvard.

I had hoped that Tough would have gotten access to the secret statistical models that colleges have created of who donates and who doesn’t, but he doesn’t seem to realize that they have studied this.

Strikingly, Caroline Hoxby, a black economist at Stanford, is more or less the villainess of Tough’s book. She did a study with Christopher Avery of lower-income students with high test scores. Hoxby found that urban high scorers often applied to prestigious colleges. But, Tough writes:

In contrast to that small, ambitious group, the majority of high-scoring low-income students had aspirations that seemed more constrained. They followed the same pattern as lower-scoring low-income students, applying only to one or two institutions, often including a local community college or nearby nonselective public university.

Who are these overlooked smart high schoolers?

These students were more likely to live in small towns or rural areas in the middle of the country and to attend schools where they would be one of only a few high-achieving students. They were also significantly more likely to be white; 80 percent of them, in fact, were white, compared to just 45 percent of the achievement typical students.

In other words, this country’s most underprivileged reservoir of underutilized talent is Red State white boys…

Of course, Asians get, by far, the highest test scores of all, and have been widening the gap in this century. But Asians don’t come up all that much in The Years That Matter Most. They tend to confuse The Narrative.

This country needs to reform testing, to get it back to doing the job it did fairly well in the past. But few are interested in discussing how to fix testing because that would require honesty, which tends to get you canceled these days.

If, instead, admission testing were eliminated in a fit of ideological pique, the smart folks at Harvard would no doubt quickly figure out some work-around and Harvard would continue to prosper, as it has done for almost 400 years.

The rest of us, however, are neither as clever nor as rich, so we would less be able to afford the consequences of doing such a stupid thing.

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