teamosil
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2009
- Messages
- 6,623
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- Location
- San Francisco
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
yes, we do know how to determine in advance which of us will better use higher education...we just don't do it because of liberal ideas like "no child left behind". We can't generate equal outcome in economics, nor can we generate equal aptitudes in our kids, or equal attitudes for that matter.
No Child Left Behind is George W. Bush's education plan that liberals hate.
No, we can't determine who is going to be successful. We can make some educated guesses. We can say this kid definitely isn't and this kid definitely is, but most kids really could go either way. I mean, the bar for somebody who is better off with a college degree than without one is a very low bar. The median income for somebody with a college degree is 65% higher than the median income of somebody with just a high school degree. That is the median, not the average. That means that even the most average guy that graduates college is doing 65% better because of it. Probably 90% or more of college graduates do better because they got the degree. By all means, colleges should have rigorous admissions standards. It is true that some people we can know with a high level of certainty that they're not going to be able to get a college-educated type of job after they graduate. But that's a process of trying to identify the very lowest performers and ruling them out, not a process of trying to identify just the very best.