As usual for the genre, the story is hung on an anecdotal hook that reveals more than the authors intend. Meet Nestor Curiel, Mexican immigrant to the South Side of Chicago.
Nestor, a polite twenty-one-year-old with black-rimmed glasses, graduated from Eisenhower High School with a 3.6 GPA and dreams of becoming an engineer. (As a child he was inspired by Discovery Channel documentaries about engineering marvels, and he also enjoyed helping his dad repair automobiles on weekends.)
...
Nestor was an above-average high school student who generally made the honors list, and he was diligent in his non-school hours as well, holding down a part-time job as a busboy and line cook at the restaurant where his father worked.
So far, so good.
His ACT score was 18, equivalent to about 870 on the SAT, which wasn't high enough to gain him admission to a selective college.
Trouble. The median ACT composite score is 21; an 18 puts Nestor in about the 32nd percentile of ACT takers. To call this is a red flag is a major understatement.
That said, more college degrees are earned by tenacity than brilliance; so long as the school was honest with him about what he should study, there'll be no complaining from me.
Ultimately, Nestor wound up narrowing his choices down to two nearby schools: Purdue University Calumet and Chicago State University. Each seemed to have advantages and disadvantages, but Chicago State offered one extra perk: $1,000 in scholarship money if Nestor enrolled in its pre-engineering program.
Are you kidding me? The school not only allowed a 32nd-percentile student to declare himself a "pre-engineering" major, it gave him a cash incentive to do so. Madness of the first rank.
Nestor is certain that the two years at Chicago State put him behind. In his first semester at UIC, he failed a math class, finding it difficult to match the faster pace and heavier workload.
Nestor, God bless him, is wrong. Or at least, half wrong; I'm certainly willing to believe that his experience at Chicago State put him even further behind than he already was. But unless young Nestor was fighting off a bout of Ebola or something on test day, there is simply no way in Hell that a story that begins with an 18 on the ACT ends with a job as a working engineer. In fact, if the story even ends with a degree in engineering, then the school is a joke and the people running it should all be fired.
So, to recap:
1. Nestor Curiel graduates from high school with a GPA (3.6) that indicates that his school considers him to have learned ~90% of what they attempted to teach him.
2. This 90%-successful high school student's college preparedness is in the bottom third of all ACT test-takers.
3. Chicago State not only accepts this 32nd-percentile student, but pays him to enroll in a degree program that most 75th-percentile students would struggle mightily with.
4. Nestor struggles with administrative stupidity, disengaged classmates, and unhelpful teachers at Chicago State.
5. Discouraged by his experience at Chicago State, Nestor transfers to UIC and begins failing classes.
6. Nestor drops out of UIC and takes up welding, having wasted years of his life and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars. (Projected)
The authors of the "dropout factory" piece look at this system and identify step #4 as the singular Point of Failure. Me, I see failure points at every step but #6. What do you think?
3 comments:
There's no question you've hit the nail on the head. The truth of the matter is that although here in America we say if you work hard enough, you can do anything, that's not reality. We are somehow unwilling to accept that each of us has our own natural limits defined primarily by our abilities, mental and physical. It really causes, I think, some very interesting tension both within societies and the individual. What you think Brian??
Adel,
I think it's related to the perception of our society as an intellectual meritocracy.
That is: these discussions happen in a sphere (government, media, and the academy) where peoples' value as professionals is well-correlated to their raw intelligence. Smarter=better for politicians, bureaucrats (of which I happen to be one), social scientists, and pundits; as a result, the people who live and work in this sphere rapidly come to mistake "smarter" for "better" in all contexts.
It's for this reason that the sentence "Bob is smarter than Joe" is considered a grievous insult to Joe, while the sentence "Joe is faster than Bob" is just a value-neutral statement of fact. And it's for this reason that we simply can't grapple with the fact that students like young Nestor belong in trade school, not college.
Of course it's all bullshit. People fall into a Gaussian distribution in every quantity you could care to measure: height, weight, beauty, speed, strength, intelligence, you name it. Fortunately, none of these traits are the essence of a person's worth, and your precise position in the distribution of one trait or another has no bearing at all on your value as a person.
I'm tempted here to write a long diatribe about how this is the inevitable consequence of a people becoming increasingly estranged from their natures as children of God. But that, I think, is another post.
Yeah, actually, your last statement at the end there is very interesting. Have you ever read the book "Status Anxiety"? It's a phenomenal book and I highly recommend it, but the general idea is that in modern societies, we become more conscious of our own shortcomings only when others around us succeed. I don't wanna go to far into this, but one of the things that is mentioned in this book is that a number of studies have shown that in cultures that are more religious, this "status anxiety" doesn't affect the people anywhere near as bad.
btw, the word verification for this post is "unopt". Isn't that exactly what we didn't wanna do in grad school? lol...
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