Redstate

Thanks for the replies. I'm usually a liberal about most issues, but education is an issue where I tend towwards conservative positions. I'm waging a one-man fight against grade inflation and lower standards in higher education, I'm overwhelmingly against private schools, I'm for vouchers, etc.

And please note that I never said anything about giving money to the federal government. Nor did I ever say anything about letting the state government make decisions for local communities. All I proposed was putting educational funding on equal footing - that's all.  

Thanks for the note on Alaska, Achance - I actually didn't know that. And I would never, ever argue against the notion that, in the end, parental guidance and native ability overwhelmingly determine a child's school performance. I should know. I was raised by a primary school teacher (my mom, who was my second grade teacher) and a Mexican-American immigrant who didn't get to go to college (my dad).  They made sure I never slouched, never screwed around, always valued the opportunities I had.  I will always respect them for that.

But one thing that you guys here at RedState are really good at thinking about - especially as conservatives - is the idea of the marginal effects of a decision.  An overly high tax rate won't cause the collapse of investment, but it will cause a marginal decrease in investment because those people at a certain point won't invest. And that's how I think about this issue. Of course, money isn't the only thing. But at the margins, equalizing funding will help kids, controlling for other factors.  

Or think about it this way.  Explain to me how a kid who was born in a poor neighborhood deserves a worse school than a kid born in a rich neighborhood.

Maybe I am just an academic snob, but looking at whether someone has a grad degree alone tells me way too little.

If I am hiring somebody, I look at where they went to school, and how well they did.

If I am hiring someone for a new business, and you ranked high in your class at Yale or Stanford, but have no graduate degree, I am going to hire you way faster than I would someone who holds an MBA or a Law Degree from a third tier state university or some small private school I have never heard of. A lot of degrees from a lot of mediocre institutions does nothing to impress me. A graduate degree from a mediocre institution particularly does not impress me, because by the time you get around to applying to graduate school you know, if you have much in the way of street smarts, that most of the best doors will not even open for you if you get a degree from a nowheresville school.

Of course, once you have worked anywhere for six months to a year, no one cares where you went to school anymore or what degrees you have; the only issue is how well you do the work. I have seen plenty of guys with nothing in the way of degrees eat the lunch of guys with a basket of degrees from the best schools.

In terms of public school versus private schools, it is kind of silly to pretend that all public schools are the same, especially in the large urban areas. If you life in Winnetka, Illinois, or Palo Alto, California, you are going to be able to attend public schools that in terms of faculty, resources, and fellow students smoke all but a handful of private schools. If you live in Cicero, Illinois, or City of Industry, California, you are going to be attending schools that are challenged just to keep the hallways safe. All the things that make schools good - highly motivated parents who value education, bright kids, ample resources - all happen in the better public schools.

Ditto for private schools. An innner city parochial school, if it is still open in the face of budget constraints and closures, will offer an education way better than the neighboring public school, but it does not live in the same world, resource wise, as the elite private schools.

I have kind of schizophrenic work history, with stints as a journalist, lawyer and entrepreneur. When I was on the hiring committee of a big law firm, I probably interviewed 50 students on campus each year, and another 50 in our offices. We didn't care much, if at all, where your undergraduate degree was from, but it was the rare candidate without top grades from a top fifteen law school that got an invite to our offices.

On the entrepreneurial side, it has varied with the phase the company was in. Max hiring, for a company I have since sold, was about 40 in one year. Many of those were presented to me for approval by people working for me, but in every case I looked over the papers and if it was a key job generally interviewed them personally. Not all were college grads, but most were, and the ones from the top schools seemed to work harder and do better.

I'm getting ready to start a new company with a new round of hiring, and how much I will care about education depends on the job. I can promise you that, for the kind of company I like to run, someone who has spent half a decade running up bogus degrees from third rate institutions will be at the very bottom of the pile.

What's your background on hiring and running businesses, now that I've shared?

"All I knew was that I could put up with a ton of busy work over a four year period, and if that's what an employer wants, then I've exhibited that ability."

I think you will find that law firms and other legal employers value that capacity highly. In fact, I suspect you have no idea what a "ton of busy work" really means just yet.

I'm a HUGE believer in the responsibility of the government (at the local level, primarily) to educate its citizens.

So do we adopt a European model of several "tracks" of secondary schooling, adding LOTS of vocational ed. opportunities, and simultaneously ramping up the coursework for the "advanced placement" kids so that the bright ones actually get challenged?

I for one slept my way to a 3.987... And except for not having any foundation in Calculus, would have gotten a B.S. instead of the B.A. I finished (I went back for an M.S. with the benefit of age & temperance)...

the ivy candidates have not been as good at collaborative team based solution implementation efforts. They have been less inclinded to follow proven methodologies, less focused on client deliverables, and more inclined to blame others for errors or mistakes. They have just not been as reliable a team member. They may be ok as lone rangers, but that is not what most postitions are looking for at an undergrad level.

They are obviously better then "redneck pines college", but the state universities, like those you named, are a better business resource at the undergrad level IMHO.

but if I have attitude about Ivies why am I going to call them in for an interview when I'm looking at 70+ resumes for a single entry level position?

I'm not. I'm just going to not call them in. No muss no fuss. Treat them the same way you treat 4th tier colleges who are barely equal to a mediocre high school.

I really find it hard to believe you're going to find a hiring manager, anywhere, who's going to hire someone so they can complain about them. I just don't believe it exists because it is just too expensive.

But now I know what that busy work means.

Or at least I'm better at acting like I know what it means.

in my experience over the past several decades in business is that the level of competence and knowledge is seriously eroded.

If the degree is more common it is common in the sense of pedestrian.

There may be uncertainty in what improvement programs will work better than others, but for crying out loud, they have to at least try to gather and analyze the data in a scientific manner. Doing more of the same is insanity.

A bit disdainful, and perhaps pompous, don't you think?

An engineering degree isn't worth the same as an ethnic studies degree, obviously.

My belief is that if you account for that, we're fine.

pay for the schools in those districts.

But the voters changed that to provide equal funding to all the State schools.

The one bad thing that arose from this...

The larger metropolitan schools in Portland required more extensive funding due to the high costs involved with teaching the higher proportion of special needs students.

The best thing that happened was the schools in the very small towns saw their funding explode.

Now I find the one thing that differentiates great schools from okay schools is the parental involvement. The wealthier neighborhood schools still perform better-regardless of funding. In fact, the low performing schools receive Federal funds also, and yet some still lag in outcomes.

If you are a solo or with your average small firm, your chances of hiring someone good straight out of a top law school are basically zero. The ones with options tend to want to go to an elite government unit, to a top name brand firm, or to this month's cool boutique loaded up with Supreme Court clerks. They may be useless and arrogant, but the competition to hire them is still fierce, and the ones with only one head usually have as many six figure offers as they bother to collect.

Smaller and less well known firms used to, back when I was practicing law, skip the whole law school recuitment  process in the face of these realities, and hire laterally from the big law firms once people figured out how deadly boring large law firm life can be. The small firms may not be as prestigious and usually are not as lucrative, but a good many of my friends found them more satisfying places to work once the glamour of the nationally known firm wore off.

It didn't used to be a matter of choice, though. It used to be the smaller firms accepting realities and making their move when it was more likely to be productive.

For the life of me, I can't see why anyone would choose to hire mediocre students straight from mediocre law schools. Even the top graduates from the top schools don't know diddly about the actual practice of law for at least a year or two, and they are quick studies. The average ones will be at least as ignorant, and maybe not so quick to pick up on things. There are form filling kinds of practices where smarts don't count, but in my experience trial lawyers playing at any level above bottom of the barrel slip and fall stuff benefited from being smart instead of dumb.

is they cause huge percentages of those entering HS to drop/flunk out by insisting on a curriculum that is not relevant to their life experience nor needed for their likely career plans.  I live in a fairly affluent, very well educated community where cost is not really an object in education funding, yet something around forty percent of the students that enter HS here either do not graduate or do not graduate with their class.  

I just finished enduring the modern iteration of public education with my oldest stepson's graduation from Eastern Washington.  He is the only one of my stepkids to graduate with his class.  Frankly he never hit a lick of work in HS or college, and I'm sure that to this day he has never read all of any book.  But he's an attractive, gregarious jock and if he had to maintain a 3.0 to retain his athletic eligibility, he found a way to get a 3.01 - and no more.  Most of the time he didn't really deserve the C, but he was a really good pitcher.

The second kid, a daughter, is probably brighter than the oldest and certainly has a better personality and work ethic.  She was adrift by the seventh or eighth grade and academically lost by her sophomore year; a phenomenon so common with girls that the school has a term for it; the sophomore slide.  We tried everything to help her, but had serious difficulty ourselves with some of the work; it was mindnumbing stupid and irrelevant.  Neither of us are mathematicians but we had at one time made our ways through the standard college math classes for those not going into science, so we should have been able to do HS algebra and geometry.  We, and especially my accountant wife, had no problem helping her with problems just set out as equations or theorums, but both had a devilish time decoding "educator speak" to decipher the "story problems" and directions for work.  The PC Speak in which textbooks and other materials are written are a foreign language.  Likewise, I doubt I would have finished HS if I had been forced to read the drivel forced on her.  They don't teach any literature that anyone over forty five or so would recognize; the only requirement for inclusion in the literary canon now seems to be that the work NOT be by an Anglo-saxon male.  Ultimately, we had her drop out early in her junior year, did some heavy home schooling, and sent her to live with her father to finish school in a much less "enlightened" community; she got a diploma but barely and could not be dragged kicking an screaming into a college class room.  She has a job, though not much of one, and the excuse making and blame fixing that she picked up in school continues to cause her real problems with work.

And the youngest boy was on a sleighride to the penitentiary and completely alienated from the school and, largely, from civilized society, by eighth or nineth grade.  We took him out and did what we could to keep him out of jail until we got him into a military academy where a regimented life and a rigorous "3 Rs" curriculum enabled him to quickly get a diploma and move on.  He's an Infantryman in Germany now and was just home on leave.  He is an unrecognizable person; genuinely "squared away."  He's confident, courteous, always engaged, and highly motivated - a sharp contrast to his haughty and "entitled" brother.

I suppose the ultimate point of this ramble is that the one that best adapted to the educational system is the one that is least adapted to life; he simply expects "stuff" to be done for him and opportunity to knock at his door.  He can be a charmer, so maybe opportunity will knock, but I suspect it won't stay long. The girl will make it, but it will be a grind and unless she can learn to take personal responsibility, I don't see any great successes for her.  And while there are inherent risks in the youngest's chosen life, he's the one with the best opportunity.  He's no intellectual but will work at what he's told to work at until his work is satisfactory.  While he can gripe with the best of them, it is a soldier's griping and the griping is just the accompaniment as he does what he's supposed to do.  Also, if all he does is this contract with the Army, he walks away from his active duty tour with about $75K in savings and a paid for college education.  His college graduate brother has about that amount in student loans and spends a lot of his time trying to figure out how he's going to get his mother and I to pay them.

I'm sorry that working with really bright people hasn't worked out for you.

In my observations, the problem is not with the folks doing the hiring, who generally are pretty excited to get someone they consider top flight, however they define top flight (and it isn't just schools - it can be their impressive last job, their fancy fellowship, etc.). The problem is with the guys in the trenches who suddenly have this hotshot parachuted in, who don't like one bit that the folks doing the hiring think there might be someone out there, somewhere, who might bring something useful and impressive to the mix that they can never themselves offer. Those folks are quick to find every fault they can with the new hire with the fancy credentials, but if they are particularly unoriginal they especially tend to find them arrogant or attitude ridden, which are hard accusations to refute because they are so atmospheric.

This is one reason why it's hard to move any entrenched organizational culture up a peg in terms of quality. Those who have prospered, or even survived, under the old system don't like fresh ideas and fresh blood. That's why capitalism works better than statism. Entrenched mediocrity gets defeated, and replaced, by new companies that don't have problems hiring people who have previously demonstrated a capacity for excellence.

If you want to take a look, go to

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461

It shows that in general, public elementary and secondary schools compare pretty well with private ones.  

That should be considered good news, since the overwhelming majority of American children go to public schools, and will for the foreseeable future.  I don't know why the Ed Dept didn't try to get more publicity for the findings.

And actually, Kevin Drum didn't "discover some significant flaws in the study."  He noted that only three of the four summary points found public schools outperforming private schools.

Then he observed an apparent downward trend in the public/private comparison between 4th and 8th grade and said he "suspected" that scores for 11th grade would show the trend continuing.  A reasonable guess about what further research might find, but not a criticism of the study.  And he's certainly not offering a research finding.  It's a guess by a blogger.

Most Americans worry about the performance of American secondary schools, both public and private.  Too many kids drop out, and too many kids learn less than we'd like them to.  In most states, the legislatures are working hard to figure out how to improve high school.  Those kids will be supporting -- and governing -- us in the not-too-distant future.

But preparation for college is only half the story.  Only a little more than half of all high school graduates go on to college at all.  And only a little more than half of those earn a bachelor's degree.

I've seen a lot of that attitude.  When I taught my last class at U-M, I started out with 45 students (the limit) and 10 on the wait list.  I ended up with 19 total.  Why?  The first day, I told them that I thought U-M students were really bright, the cream of the crop. And because of that respect, I wouldn't let them get away with inferior effort. Thus, the mean grade in my class would be a C+, there'd be about 200 pages of reading a week, and I'd require a 25-page final paper analyzing the political system of a developing country and requiring primary resources.  

money spent on education is better spent and directed at the local level...they know the community needs better than Washington.

The national level is absolutely the worst place to put education level, because Washington IS one big bureuacracy.

In a recent interview in "Imprimis" Milton Friedman said this:

The effective literacy rate in the Unted States today is almost surely less than it was 100 years ago. Before government had any involvement in education, the majority of youngsters were schooled, literate, and able to learn. It is a disgrace that in a country like the United States, 30 percent of youngsters never graduate from high school."

I read an article the other day, I believe it was in "Human Events" that only 21% of Detroit Public School children ever graduate.  That is pathetic, and no amount of money thrown at DPS is going to fix the problem. Parents must be allowed other options than the public school system.

that is except in rare cases. I would exempt New Orlean, Detroit and Washington, DC from local control. Those particular cities have not shown any ability to spend money wisely at all!

I went to a public school when I was a kid and I can't say that I experienced anything out of the ordinary.  I will also note that I wasn't really paying attention then either.  Now that I am older and I am paying attention the decision for me boils down to what is being taught.  These days, public schools are littered with leftist ideas and indoctrination.  If you don't make a certain income, that is the fate of your children.  Private schools give you a choice of where you want your children to go and what you want them to learn.  You get to decide what they will be surrounded by during the school day, i.e. Catholicism, secularism, Protestantism.  Private schools allow for more freedom for the parents who want their children to get a better education than they would otherwise get in a public highschool.

That is where I think studies between public/private schools miss the point.  During the first third of your schooling you are learning the things needed to begin critical thinking.  You are learning how to count, the alphabet, how to spell, how to formulate sentences etc.  Once you learn these things--right around 4th to 5th grade--you are then susceptible to what the Liberals in the public school system want you to "learn" which probably explains the statistical drop off from 4th to 8th grade.  Private schools allow you to look through the curriculim and decide whether or not you want your child to go there.  Some are even open about the ideological stance that they take with their curriculim.  In short, you get a better chance of intellectual honesty from Private schools than you do from Public, and to me, that makes all the difference in the world.

I understand looking over resumes of people, including kids from the Ivies, and deciding that the  kid who worked his way through community college is the better candidate. It happens all the time.

What I don't understand, for rational business people who actually might be able to hire kids from the Ivies, is choosing not to even look at them.

Whatever else they are, kids from the Ivies are smart. Uniformly. They've also demonstrated the capacity, at some stage in their lives, to work hard. If they were not smart, hard working, and liked by the powers that be at their high schools, they wouldn't have gotten into an Ivy League school. (What they don't need to get in is money, since all the Ivies give you as much financial aid as you need, unlike most state schools.)

So why not even look at them?

Possible answers:

1. The good Ivy grads won't look at you or your organization, and any that will talk to you have been turned down by everyone else already. An Ivy kid who is really good who wants to do advertising might choose to start his/her career at Leo Burnett, not a mid sized regional firm, and so on.  If the good ones won't trickle down to your level, maybe you are better off passing on the Ivy grads, because their even appearing at your door means they've already been rejected by countless other firms.
   
2. They threaten you and your team. This can happen alongside not being able to get the good ones, because a bottom of the barrel Ivy grad can still be plenty arrogant and threatening, even if they did hit their personal peak senior year in high school.
   
3. You don't know how to manage them. You are used
   

to managing people without other attractive options, giving them some version of the my way or the high way speech, and people with plenty of other good options start looking for the door first time they hear it.

Please note - of these three options, all represent, to some degree, problems with you and your organization, not just with the Ivy grads who walk in the door.

I don't know if any or all of these apply to you, but I am quite certain that if you find it advantageous to not even look at a kid from the Ivies, there is something suboptimal going on.

What would you say about a basketball coach, maybe one who is a strapping 5'2", who absolutely refuses to even consider recruiting seven footers, or kids who were listed on the McDonald's All American list? Notwithstanding that the All American list contains a few crackheads and problem personalities, you would note that the top programs do seem to draw pretty heavily from that list if they can, and conclude that maybe the bigger problem was with the coach or the program he has to sell.

The fact is, the top investment banks, the top law firms, the top VC start ups, the top ad agencies, the top media organizations (I could go on and on), all have more than their share of kids from top schools - the Ivies, Chicago, Stanford, the public Ivies like Virginia and Michigan, and so on. They can attract the good ones, along with the very best from every where else, and they are able to handle them once they get them.

I've worked in elite professional organizations, and I've worked in shops I've owned and run. It has always been a collegial work environment. I like hiring really bright people, and having them push me. I like not being the smartest guy in the room, especially when the smartest guys in the room are working for me.

When 92% of Harvard alumni graduate with "honors," one has to wonder what's really happening there. And "book smarts" indicate absolutely nothing about attitudes and ethics.

Yes, there is grade inflation at Harvard. There also is grade inflation at pretty much every other American university. There are a few schools that require professors to grade to a B mean, but that's rare.

I also agree that smarts says nothing about ethics or attitudes. It is not as if there is a negative correlation. You should note, however, that getting into a top school is not just about smarts, although smarts is a necessary element. Harvard, Yale and the rest all turn down every year dozens of applicants with perfect board scores. They look for high levels of performance in high school, and in my experience high levels of performance do correlate positively with discipline and hard work, which in turn correlate positively with good ethics and good attitudes.

Let me make this easy for you. Our points have been, in this decade, undergrads in the 2000's:

Ivy Schoools = presumptuous attitude without substance or capabilities and without desire to learn

Leading State Schools = less presumptuous attitude with openess to learn capabilities required for success

We work in fast moving collaborative environments where you need to rely on people who are self-directing yet able to follow procedures, analytical and able to work well with others.

In short, in leading business practices we need well rounded resilient people. Those kind of undergrads do not appear to be coming from Ivy schools today.

It sounds like you work in little self-made fiefdoms where you are not used to differing opinions from your own.

from Yale, or many of the other ivy's. In the last 5 years the performance of new hires and candidates I have seen from good state schools have been much better than the ivy's. The ivy undergrad brand isn't providing a good product. I wonder what they are doing wrong?

was truly not my intent. I was just making comments from personal experiences related to hiring and developing young talent coming directly out of undergrad programs from a number of top ranked schools, public and private, over the last 5-7 years.

My personal data points for the ivy types are limited to a smaller population <25. My personal data points for public types is larger, >50.

There is no doubt about the very high intelligence of everyone we hire; we do testing so we do not have to depend on GPAs. I also know from personal experience the heavy work load in those academic environments. I respect that very much.

It is the overall success rate of these individuals that have been differing in recent years. Over time, you get a good indication of who is going to make manager and partner based on what attributes they demonstrate the first 18 months of employment. On average, the young ivys of the last few years are not advancing as successfully in this professional business environment. I hope that changes, but it will probably require institutional change at the schools.

I also imagine this could be an emerging trend at some of the larger branded public schools, like the U of M example mentioned. That would be a very bad trend for the nation.

of bright young lads and lasses, I never denied that the young grads were bright and, often, very hard working.  I just couldn't stand their haughty, entitled attitudes.  I never had but one employee, a lawyer, that was Ivy or close, don't know just where Cornell fits, but he was older and fairly experienced when he came to work for me.  One of the brightest, most dedicated employees I've ever had.  But the young ones, say last ten years, I found to be almost insufferable, especially the males.  I looked around one day five or six years ago and discovered my whole front rank staff was female, about half lawyers and half up thru the ranks, and all in their mid-thirties to early forties.  Last couple of recruitments at my entry level, not a single male got past the screening interviews and it was all an issue of attitude.

its just down the state road from hillbilly high, and an arch rival to kissin cousin community college in neighboring four butte county.

I'm a Harvard College graduate (graduated in the late 90s) and now a graduate school student at University of Michigan.  I thought I could put in a word here.

My sense of streiff's reaction to Ivy Leage graduates actually stretches far beyond the Ivy League.   I've noticed the same sense of entitlement amongst undergraduates at Michigan when I've taught them (about three years of teaching experience).

My opinion - and it's an incredibly deeply-held one - is that the sense of entitlement that streiff notes is a direct consequence of grade inflation.  Grade inflation has been commented on most strenuosly in reference to the Ivy League, but it definitely occurs here at Michigan.  You can find evidence of grade inflation nationwide at http://www.gradeinflation.com (somewhat dated, though).  We've essentially convinced undergraduates at many top schools that they've already arrived by letting them turn in shoddy work that subsequently earns a B+.  In turn, in my classes, the mean grade is usually around a C+.

There are a number of reasons that have been offered to explain the curse of grade inflation.  But the one I believe most strongly is that we have an incentive problem in higher education.  Pretty much the only thing that matters to my future professional success is research.  That's it - how many articles I published and where they were published.  That means that the incentives facing me are driving me to ignore teaching.  Most graduate students (who do a majority of the grading) and assistant professors try to avoid teaching like the plague.  And when they do, they try to spend as little time on it as possible.  Well, if you have a stack of 50 papers and you want to minimize the amount of comments you have to make in the margins and the complaints you get, the easiest thing to do is grade easily.  

And to back streiff a little bit, I think this is most true at the top schools, where educators are trying particularly hard to find top posts in academia.

To stop the sense of entitlement, we need to reform the incentive structure for professors.  Radically.

My dad got a high school eduction while he worked 30 hours a week to support his family. He could've been an engineer - he's that good at math.  So when I got to Harvard, I knew what I had was an opportunity of a lifetime - a privilege - not a sense of entitlement. I was constantly disappointed that more professors didn't hold me to task.  

That doesn't change my opinion that, on average, the people I knew at Harvard were some of the smartest people I've ever known - blazingly so.  But streiff's argument holds a heck of lot of water.  Just thought I could supply a reason.

Sorry. I'll stop ranting.

I don't know what industry you work in. I've served in the military, civil service, and in private sector. I've never seen anyone intimidated by a kid hired fresh out of college. I have seen a lot of them browned off when that kid won't come to work on time and believes their current job is just an unfortuante delay on their way to the executive suite.

So I guess we've just had really, really different experiences.

I guess it all depends on what you are hiring them to do and which ones you get to look at.

If you are the hiring guy for the night shift at your local 7-11, yeah, any recent Ivy grads that wander through the door looking for that kind of job might be damaged goods. The same can go for a lot of jobs that other people might have to take - if you have an Ivy degree, and can't do better, maybe there's a reason. After all, tough as it is to get into an Ivy level school (well, at least the top Ivies), the admissions people are not omniscient, and they do make some strange choices on occasion. Those kids can end up struggling. I certainly would not just hire any Ivy graduate - it's just that I would consider an Ivy or equivalent degree a more encouraging starting point in terms of predicting raw talent and horsepower than a doctorate in business bloviation from West Bumpkus State.

It also matters on what you are hiring them for. I don't think an Ivy League degree - or any degree, for that matter - matters much for sales. You can be dumb as a box of rocks and be a great salesman, if you have the gift, and if you have the gift you can easily out earn most Ivy grads. Start talking jobs that turn more on rigorous analysis, back breaking hours, discipline, presentability and focus, and my experience has been that the kinds of kids that get into and do well at Ivies and peer schools are likely to be good candidates - that's why investment bank analyst classes, to cite one example, are generally at least half made up with kids from those types of schools.

As for better state schools, some are just as good as the Ivies. I would hire from The University (University of Virginia, for the rest of you) or Michigan or selective honors programs at a lot of schools, on equal terms with the Ivies. I also would and will hire from much lesser schools if the candidate appears to have the juice. That I am a bit of an academic snob doesn't mean I'm totally stupid.

Of course, these days the hot ticket is the Indian Institute of Technology.

students. It's about keeping them out of the labor market and offering spoils jobs for political hacks, especially in big cities.

Teachers unions will do whatever maximizes dues. The impact on education is and unintended consequence.

appreciated the education but really didn't like the elitism of his experience. He definitely cared about making a name for himself, too.

yeah, that is all that we hire. I totally agree with hiring the best and brightest, that is exactly what we do. When you do, and you support them with good infrastructure and good compensation, good things happen.

My comments have been based on observations of undergrads from the traditional ivys vs. the other top schools. I don't know how to be clearer than that.

I might want to do that with my next company. Is there a package or a program that you can recommend?

I gotta be honest with you and tell you I'd blow my own brains out before running that route. I'm a litigator, and with somewhere on the order of three percent of my class -- not distributed by grades -- could actually litigate their way out of a wet paper bag. I only include myself in that grouping because I've done it. Most filtered into very large firms where they did what they did best, which is to say, write the same tedious crap again and again.

Not only that, but the Top 25 are dominated by kids (and they're usually kids these days) who think they're entitled to be there, and act that way. No thanks. Give me some kid with decent but not great grades from a state university who's hungry and has obvious flashes of intelligence. Preferably did some sort of actual job before taking the Bar; even more preferably, has a history of doing grunt work before he took the Bar, so if his secretary falls over dead tomorrow, he's not going to sit in his office and wonder who'll do his dictation.

There are, I want to stress, bright folks coming out of those schools; but if I see any that I recognize from the top 25, I get leery, and if I see incredible grades, I worry I'm going to spend the first six months just stopping them from writing law review articles on motions to dismiss.

I want someone who didn't have it all growing up, wants it reasonably much right now, has experienced life to some extent so he won't burn out overdoing it his first year, and who will actually listen when someone tells him he's wrong.

YMMV. But your filtered candidates are exactly the ones I don't want.

I found that undergrads from Ivies, and fellowtravelers like Williams, Vassar, etc, possessed a sense of entitlement that just made them a real drag on any project you were working on.

I've no doubts about their product at the grad/professional school level but I've been underwhelmed by their undergrads.

what industry do you work in, how many entry level college grads would you interview/hire during a year?

Was the problem with the kids with the fancy degrees, or with the folks jealous that they didn't have a fancy degree? I've seen it both ways, but I've seen a lot more of people without the high end credentials having real attitude and jealousy problems.

of a free, public education.  Were it not for one, I'd be working for the minimum wage at the Roper lawn mower factory in Swainsboro, Georgia.

I think that classroom and hallway discipline is the first key.  Kids have to be taught that school is a special place and you don't get to behave however you want there.  And yes, I'm all for whipping Hell out of the incorrigible ones; an adolescent male only understands and respects something that he knows will hurt him.

Second, I believe that tracking is the key and we really need more people who can fix a lawn mower or a boat motor and things like that.  A good mechanic or whatever eventually can become a shop owner or a manufacturer, that's where entrepreneuerials is really bred.

There's a bunch of philosophical and educational barriers to seeing it this way.  The real problem is the Ed Schools, but that is for a whole 'nuther thread.

If you are a solo or with your average small firm, your chances of hiring someone good straight out of a top law school are basically zero. The ones with options tend to want to go to an elite government unit, to a top name brand firm, or to this month's cool boutique loaded up with Supreme Court clerks. They may be useless and arrogant, but the competition to hire them is still fierce, and the ones with only one head usually have as many six figure offers as they bother to collect.

True, although I've noticed more and more midsizes competing for those candidates because, simply, you get to actually lawyer in those first seven to ten years, and not just do research and writing. Case in point, one lady from my school, 1L when I was 3L, magna and all the rest, went to a midsize because she knew she'd be trying cases within three years.

Doesn't go to my point or yours, but ok.

Smaller and less well known firms used to, back when I was practicing law, skip the whole law school recuitment  process in the face of these realities, and hire laterally from the big law firms once people figured out how deadly boring large law firm life can be. The small firms may not be as prestigious and usually are not as lucrative, but a good many of my friends found them more satisfying places to work once the glamour of the nationally known firm wore off.

Still works that way.

For the life of me, I can't see why anyone would choose to hire mediocre students straight from mediocre law schools. Even the top graduates from the top schools don't know diddly about the actual practice of law for at least a year or two, and they are quick studies. The average ones will be at least as ignorant, and maybe not so quick to pick up on things.

Here's where we part ways. Some examples should suffice, concededly anecdotal, but what the heck, that's what we're doing here anyway.

This fellow is, hands-down, one the best litigators in the Southeast. Smart as hell. Presents well. Will try a case forward and back. Makes a great deal of money doing it. Mercer is not, precisely, a Top 25 school, with due respect to our own Erick. I dealt with him in a weird subrogation/personal injury joinder suit, and both the guys from the Top 100 firm and I knew who the best lawyer in that room was.

I tried a case a few months ago against some folks from one of the Top 100 firms. My codefendant's counsel was a seventh-year guy from a Top 50 school, on a good day, who was not precisely working for a Top 100 firm. The poor guy doing lead work for the Plaintiff was a seventh year Ivy League best-of-the-best-with-honors-sir guy, and he was shaking as we began pretrial argument. I consider myself a slightly better than decent litigator, and I watched the diaper dandy get sliced to ribbons. The poor seventh year newbie actually started arguing with the judge after she ruled in his favor on one of the motions.

And this is before we even got to picking the freaking jury.

Bright guy. Charming. Good looking. Excellent pedigree. Has more "experience" than I do. And a wet paper tiger to boot.

(He didn't win.)

Don't even get me started on the guy from a certain Top 100 L.A. firm who was a partner who had less trial experience than I do, and who got destroyed because he had to be lead dog on a relatively straightforward jury trial.

This is not because I'm a great lawyer. I'm not. And it's fairly easy to critique the other guy when you're not in his shoes. But I have to tell you, of the many, many grads from Top 25s I've dealt with, maybe a handful were worth their weight.

I'll let you in on something else, at least from my vantage point. I've been blessed to try cases against, alongside, and with, some incredible lawyers. Not one went to a school that would have even caught your notice. Most went to State schools like Stetson, UF, Nova, Georgia State, and Mercer. Some went to unaccredited law schools, no less. In fact, doing a quick mental survey of the opponents and allies I'd most fear in a courtroom, not one came from a school in the Northeast, or indeed, one in the Top 25. The best lawyer I've ever seen is a slightly mad mediocre graduate from the University of Georgia, who could run rings around anyone I've ever seen or met or, I would venture, heard of. He's bright, he'll work you to death, he'll outprepare you, and he can work a jury like no man's business.

Which kinda segues into the larger point: Law is not, no matter how we like to pretend otherwise, rocket science. I've done pretty much every kind of litigation you can imagine, some IPOs, real estate, and most, but not all, of the rest that you can imagine a lawyer doing. One need not be a genius to be a lawyer. One need not be a genius to be a good lawyer. One need not be a Top 25 grad to be a successful trial lawyer (which is not in fact code for "Plaintiff's attorney"), and I'm really sort of at a loss for all but a handful of Top 25 grads down here who are.

Heck, I'm a better than average trial lawyer; that alone should suggest that intelligence is hardly a prerequisite for the job.

And to make this even worse: The dumbest lawyer I know, who went to a Bottom 25, and was hardly with honors, draws a regular salary+distribution in the comfy six figures. He's literally so stupid that he doesn't realize he's the butt of jokes from the rest of the not insignificantly sized local Bar, and he could buy and sell me on the Thai slave market. And he's hardly unique.

And (another initial conjunction!) the idea that Top 25s catch on faster than the kids coming out of Southwest Texas State is ridiculous on its face. Having had associates from podunk schools, midlevel schools, and Top 15, my unvarnished opinion is that the last tend to spend way too much time gilding the damned lilly, and get caught up describing the bark on a particularly interesting oak while the forest is burning down around them. (To mix metaphors, but to stay with a plant theme.) The guys from the other schools are more likely to say, Ok, what's the problem? then set about trying to fix it. They tend to be easier to toss into a hearing with no notice.

I understand why the biggest firms want those Top 25ers; I went to one, and was one, myself once. They want kids who will write brief after brief for clients who hate going to trial. They keep a small stable of actual trial lawyers, a small stable of actual appellate lawyers, and a huge pool of memo, brief, and letter writers, because their clients are litigation averse. That's cool.

But let's not pretend that out in the real world, there's any premium attached to a piece of paper with one of 25 words on it, when actually evaluating people who can get the job done.

One reason I am not excited, or encouraged, by this study is that I don't think it addresses the real issue. Public versus private is not really the issue, because given the local funding of public schools, you have public schools in the affluent areas that look a lot like private schools. There is economic gating (if you can't pay the big mortgage, your kids aren't going to go there), active parental support, plenty of resources, and so on.

The issue that bothers me, and that is a uniquely American issue given the way we fund schools with very local property taxes, is providing a decent education, public or private, to every kid that wants such an education.

Right now, there are kids who are never going to have a shot at a decent primary education, much less a good high school education, much less advanced education, simply because their families live in areas where the public schools stink and they are allowed (and can afford) no other options. By the time they are ten years old, the age of my youngest child, it's game over. They are so far behind they can't possibly catch up.

Lumping those kids in with the kids from New Trier or Palo Alto high, and comparing them against a private school mix that includes woefully under resourced religious schools, and concluding that our system of providing public education is A-OK, completely misses the problem, IMHO.

Human capital is a resource, just like any other resource. We squander it at our peril, and right now we are squandering a lot of it.

Would vouchers or school choice give those kids from the horrible neighborhoods a better shot? Can't say. I can say that it's a crying shame that generations have come and gone, locked out of the American dream, because leaders of a self-serving public educational establishment want to protect themselves at all costs, even if that means boxing out even fair tests of what might be better solutions.

I wanted to take issue with horse in one respect.  I think there's an image of Ivy League kids here is that clashes with what I saw while an undergraduate at Harvard.

Ivy League students are, nearly to a man, really smart.  But what I think you guys are missing is that they work really hard.  Let me compare Harvard (my undergraduate institution) with Michigan (my graduate institution). As a Harvard social science major, I was assigned somewhere around 600-800 pages of reading a week.  I was expected in my "sophomore tutorial" (small classes where you learn to write in your discipline) to write a 6-8 page paper a week and then edit last week's paper, as well.  One of my roommates was a chemistry grad who, during Orgo, was more or less expected to spend about 40 hours a week studying.  My girlfriend at the time, an English major, had two novels a week per class. All this work also tends to foster quite a bit of intellectual curiosity, I'd say.  I learned as much from my fellow undergrads as from my professors while a student there. And in addition to these levels of challenges, I also worked 15-20 hours a week, sang in an a capela group, had a normal dating life (well, maybe not quite . . .), and played intramural sports.

In comparison, my students at Michigan whine if I give them more than 50 pages of reading in one week and complain when I tell them there are two midterms.

Bottom line: it's not that Ivy League undergraduates don't work hard. Far from it.  But the thing about Ivy League students is that they're typically used to a lifetime of success. When they work hard, they expect success every time.  THAT'S where the difference lies. They are blissfully unaware that, in a lot of places, hard work isn't enough on its own.  

I respect a lot of opinions here and you can read above as to my sense of entitlement and grade inflation - what I'd call a "consumerist" view on education in a lot of places.  But this unmitigated bashing is actually pretty far off.

"Ivy League Graduate" was not a constitutionally or statutorily protected class; feel free to ignore them so long as it is on that basis alone.

picking up the application and giving it a cursory glance counts as consideration.

that, right or wrong, hiring a 22-year-old boasting of being an Ivy League graduate might be something I wouldn't want to even deal with if I were an experienced employer. Equal opportunity says you have to look at everyone's application at least, so sure, it would be wrong and against business law not to, but you might also find it an entirely predictable experience.

of this.

You know, if I take the time to write a response I sort of expect you to take time to read it. Obviously, I expected too much.

See anywhere where I said we didn't fire them? No. Of course not if you had bothered to read but you are just too busy making your experience better than mine... and indeed that of a half-dozen other people who've made the same observation that I have. Seems to me after whacking away at organizations that "won't change" you really ought to take a close look at how you've addressed a lot of info that disagrees with your love affair with hiring "the best and brightest."

So I'm done with you here. I don't have the time or the energy to talk to someone who thinks that a freakin law firm is more entrepreneurial than an ad agency.

in Alaska with the State paying almost all the freight on education, money no object most years, and it doesn't make a whit of difference.  Kids from a socio-economic background that values work and education do better than those who do not, and nobody seems to have a clue what to do about that because there are NO ideas from the educrats and educators other than pay them more and send more money.

By contrast, I went to HS in a poor, rural Georgia county that ran its schools off county revenue.  We had a basic three Rs plus history and government curriculum and demanding grading.  The college prep curriculum was very classical and very demanding.  There were desks in rows, kids in them, and anybody who got out of line knew what a rap from a pointer felt like, if you got really out of line, the principal was about six two and two forty and swung a wicked paddle.  Funny thing, out of the class I started HS with, only two dropped out, girls that had to visit their aunt in Montana, and most of us have done pretty well in the world.  Frankly, the the extent that some of us didn't or had detours along the way, it was our own fault, but the sixties did offer so many temptations.

Start with discipline and academic rigor, then talk to me about money.

Partyofone, that's a tremendous post.  I grew up in a depressed part of Texas and, sadly, our public schools were just horrible. My parents, to whom I owe everything, nearly went broke sending me to the local (private) Catholic school to keep me out of public school.

When I got to Harvard, I knew kids who had dark rooms and 1,000 seat theaters in their PUBLIC schools. I was absolutely blown away.

Simple mathematics:  taking the average money spent per pupil in the United States hides the standard deviation of that spending.  Too many kids are trapped into bad schools because their families are poor. Equality of opportunity just falls apart in these circumstances.

I've struggled with thinking thorugh the solutions to these problems. I don't think vouchers do the job. But I sometimes wonder whether aggregating money to the state level and then re-distributing it to schools based on size is the way to go about it.  What just kills me about that is creating a huge bureuacracy that has to do the job.  But is there any other way?  

vice president in a medium large advertising and public relations agency, one with a lot of fun lobbying and government contracts to go with selling widgets.

Key ingredients: good speaking skills, good writing, and hustle.

I found large state universities were the best and I found involvement in athletics an/or student government were the best predictors of success if the basic skills were there.

I have worked in organizations where we can and do fire people who don't come to work when we tell them to. It fixes the problem pretty quickly.

It seems that you and I have had very different experiences. You seem to have spent your time in big bureaucratic operations, and I have spent my life avoiding places like that. I suspect that the applicant pools differ almost as much as the work environments. In my experience, really smart people usually value working with other really smart people, and generally have no problem getting up out of bed and to the office when they are involved in creating something interesting.

and L/R types as a hiring manager, but my experience is much like yours, especially with the males; one heckuva lot of attitude.  They take one look around, decide they're smarter than everybody including you, and that they should have the corner office, reserved parking, and a personal secretary (who they will expect to do most of the work.)

The other side of my work included a lot of advising supervisors and manager on performance improvement, discipline, and discharge.  I've had a lot of fancy paper waved at me in those lying and crying sessions.

As the workforce around me got younger and younger I saw them coming in feeling better and better about themselves and having less and less reason to feel that way.

My first real job after school was as a management trainee for a large corporation, and I'll admit to having been thoroughly intimidated by the people I worked for very, very interested in doing and being whatever they wanted me to be.  In the last few years I've had little punks months out of school come in my office and very presumptiously start telling me how to run my shop.  They didn't stay in my office long.

in the Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor. Up on the top floor of the Student Activities Building they have a department called Career Planning and Placement Office. Their job is to help students get jobs "out there" once they graduate.

Understand, many of the students here already have inflated egos...the people at CPP would tell these young people, "You're better than anyone else (applying for a job) because YOU went to the U of M!"

I've seen a lot of egos crushed when employers decided to take those inferior people instead!

make a nice combination to screen and evaluate entry-level professional personnel on raw cognitive, analytical and occupational skills.

Even then, they are still just indicators. Case study, resiliency and team interviews help to dive deeper into specific desired areas.

It is the sense of entitlement that has steadly gotten worse over the last 5 years. They are not nearly as good as they believe.  As a result, they often get in over their head, fail, and then start looking for someone to blame.

We have even had a couple just not show up to work anymore. Sunday night email saying they have found something else. Nothing like real world deliverables and responsibilities to separate the wheat from the chaf.

disdain for small schools from nowheresville vs. the ivy undergrads.

... is more and more a necessity than a luxury these days..."

Because the undergraduate degree has been watered down to the point where it is more the equivilent of a HS diploma of 30 years ago because the HS diploma is more like middle school of 30 years ago and so on.

The dumbing down of America continues apace.

when all you had to do was ask any DC school kid or parent.

Why do we even spend the money?

Another point to make is that serious advocates of school choice, myself included, don't think competition will necessarily lead to better private schools displacing public schools.  The idea is that competition will make public schools better since they will have to compete for students.  They will respond to parental and student concerns faster and more effectively.  Ineffective bureaucrats will not be kept on due to seniority.  The goal of school choice is not the demise of public education, it is the application of market forces to a sector that continues to operate as a monopoly.  People would not tolerate a monopoly in almost any other sector, why education?

are always an interesting subject, more for what they don't reveal than what they do.  Drum, for instance, makes the first step of pointing out that public schools start out at near parity to private schools at the early grade levels and then begin to diverge until we reach the university level, where public universities suffer from 50% drop out rates compared to 5-15% for most private universities.

What Drum doesn't do is try to explain why this is.  If you put a gun to my head and forced me to give an explanation, I'd suggest this.  First of all, this divergence is not an artifact of this study but is almost always noticed in any survey of school performance.  It was as true 15 years ago as it is true today, for virtually all school districts across the country.  Of more interest is that this divergence effect is mirrored among individual students as well.  To elaborate, children from poor families are generally predicted by early childhood testing to do poorly in school compared to their peers.  These students are often targeted for programs like Head Start and the effects are real - after participating in the program 2nd and 3rd grade students who might have been doing poorly otherwise perform as well or better than their peers.  However, a great majority of the time once these students reach 6th or 7th grade there is what has come to be known as the dreaded "fade out effect" - they begin to slip behind their peers and usually regress back to the low performance level that studies predict for such students.  It's as if they were never put into any special program at all.  There are plenty of rather nasty fights over why this "fade out effect" happens, but these aren't terribly relevant to the question of vouchers.  Suffice to say that is does happen and helps to explain this divergence noted in the study in this way -

If you compare the diversity of programs public schools offer to their youngest students to the programs provided by private schools, I don't think it's even close - public schools have by far the superior resources to invest in programs for students.  For what it's worth, I can provide some anecdotal evidence of this: while I was taking the usual boring core classes at private Catholic schools from kindergarten to 8th grade, my friends at public schools had access to all sorts of GT (gifted-talented) programs, after-school activities, and the like.  This investment pays off, at least in the lower grade levels - public school students in the early grades appear to be performing on average on a par or better than their private school counterparts.  However, much like what happens with Head Start versus normal students, private school students start to catch up and then overtake their public school peers by 5th or 6th grade, and by high school the differences are even starker.

What makes all of this even more bedeviling is that while Head Start ends in the early grades, so that perhaps the fade out effect can be explained by students forgetting their lessons or losing their work ethic in a lower pressure environment, the superiority of public elementary school accelerated programs and the like continues throughout all the grades.  And yet, by 8th grade graduation public school students still perform much worse than their private school peers.  To me, this is an astounding fact.  If it were properly explained by policymakers, I believe the public/private school debate as we know it would be over.  People are used to hearing the old argument that just throwing money at public schools doesn't work, but put that argument in this context and I think it becomes much more persuasive.

There are all kinds of reasons that private schools outperform public schools at the later grade levels - maybe sticking to simple core classes is better for students, maybe the teachers are better, maybe the standards are better, maybe the students are all rich and therefore destined to outperform their poorer peers.  Whatever.  It doesn't matter.  All these interesting tidbits of data lead to one conclusion - there is nothing particularly special or sacred about public schools, and therefore there is no reason not to give parents as open a choice as possible in where to send their children.  If a parent wants all the accelerated classes and special programs of a public school, well then they should have that option.  If they feel a focus on the core curriculum of math, science, and reading would better suit their child, they should have that option too.  Ironically (if you're a liberal), parents are much better at making that decision than politicians.  Let them make it.

is as natural in education as it is in national economies.  Things tend to become banalized, for lack of a better word, and lose value over time, no matter what they are.  Some of the inflation in education can probably be explained by certain progressive groups believing everyone is entitled to at least a high school, perhaps even a college, education.  Some of it can also be explained that in our tech-driven society, more and more things require at least a high school level proficiency to be able to do well.  This raises the demand for access to high schools.  And though, as Adam points out below, public education in this country operates as a monopoly, monopolies still react to changes in demand, even if they only do so reluctantly.  Of course the analogy with economics kind of breaks down here, because usually high demand coupled with limited supply leads to high prices, price in this case being educational quality.  Somewhat perversely, schools instead lowered their "prices," but that's government for you.  I'm not that disturbed by degree inflation because we can invent degrees and specializations ad infinitum to keep up with the pace, so there will always be a limit on the number of people who are recognized as having mastered their fields.  It just takes an adjustment in how you think about degrees.

Blame Sputnik and the over-reaction of the Education Lobby.

An air-conditioner repair man doesn't need to know trigonometry, but most high schools teach it to them anyway.

For those who do not know, one of the reasons a graduate degree means so much more today is that in most cases, admission to a graduate degree program falls outside the realm of the university admissions office.

For example, at Berekely, admission to the undergrad program is granted by the university admissions office. The Departments have nothing to do with it.

But for grad school, applicants apply directly to the Department. The Department decides who it wants and then notifies the university who they are going to admit. The "university" has nothing to do with it.

This means that the usual affirmative action nonsense has no place in grad school admissions. At Berkeley, the various ethnic storm troopers tried mightily to "demand" that the grad programs inplement AA, but all of them refused.

What this means is that people with grad degrees generally got them because they EARNED them. Not always, but most of the time.

This is the kiss of death for AA. If your job applicant has a MA or a PhD from a decent univeristy, he probably knows what he's doing. A BA degree means he put in his time in class. You have no idea what he actually learned there.

politicians) will never allow school choice/vouchers - it will have to be forced on them by overwhelming public mandate.  Privately, the unions know their product, public school education, is failing but the issue is not insufficient funds. The problem is that we've been pouring money down the sinkhole of public education for so long and have never demanded true accountability or real performance standards.  The best thing charter schools/vouchers bring to the table is competition, which will force public schools to improve as well as give parents real choices regarding education. Vouchers need to belong to the parents, after all they are the taxpayers, and parents in turn decide what school receives funding for their children's education.  

The less government is involved in primary and secondary education - the better the quality of education.

 

When I graduated with a BBA in finance, I knew nothing.  All I knew was that I could put up with a ton of busy work over a four year period, and if that's what an employer wants, then I've exhibited that ability.

Law school is different (as I study for the bar now).  You MUST learn stuff or you get kicked out.  It's that simple.

I must admit though:  right now I wouldn't mind a little liberalism in the way of "Gee Shane, you worked really hard in school.  Top 20%, Law Review.  Okay, you're in. Don't worry about, the exam's just a formality anyway."

Of course, once I'm a member of the Bar I'll be pushing for tougher standards!

I'd think that the problem isn't with the rigor required by the degree, but by the simple fact that more and more people have degrees, which causes the market value of the degree to drop.  Having a degree just isn't very special these days: it's expected.