By Professor Doom
Every few months
it seems, an old 8th
grade exam makes the internet rounds. The questions on the exam
generally blow away high school graduates of today, and usually the difficulty
of the exam is hand-waved away—“oh, it was mostly just local knowledge” and
“nobody really passed it, or was expected to.”
Old tests are a
surprisingly valuable historical resource. Old textbooks aren’t nearly as
reliable for indicating what students learn, since it’s never a sure thing that
any particular topic in the book is actually covered. Heck, today’s community
colleges are so unhinged that it’s common enough for almost nothing of the
textbook to be used, and we know this because we can look at the tests and see
with our own eyes what students are expected to learn. This blog might not even
exist but that I looked at tests I gave over a decade ago, and realized “if I
gave tests like this today, I’d end up failing the whole class.”
A 19th
century Harvard entrance examination surfaced recently, and it’s a nice
artifact of what people knew back then. About 90% of
students that took this test, passed it. We really need to
bring back entrance examinations, so that only people who are interested in
learning actually end up in college. Old
accreditation actually mandated entrance exams, but
“modern” accreditation got rid of that, because it cut into growth—anything
that gets in the way of those sweet, sweet, student loan checks has been
removed from higher education.
Because Harvard
had such a “difficult” exam, weeding out the bottom 10% of applicants, it kept
its reputation as a fine school into the 20th century. Instead of
spending its time on teaching students basic material anyone with an interest
could learn in a few months, Harvard classes were allowed to focus the
knowledge that made humanity great.
On the other
hand, the student loan scam got rid of entrance exams at many
institutions—there was just way, way, too much money on the line. Sure, you
could have an entrance exam, but that meant no administrative palaces or
gigantic salaries. Not having an exam meant the Poo Bah could count on a salary
and benefits package of a million dollars or more. Educators were fine with entrance
exams, but it was administration that got to decide whether to have them or
not, and well, we can see how that decision went.
Entrance exams are
gone, on many campuses, and anyone who wants checks can come to campus and get
them. Getting an education, however, is not an option at many campuses.
Now, on many
campuses, 90% of the material taught is high school level, 8th grade
level, even 3rd grade level material. Something
like 25% of our “higher education” resources now go into 6th grade
level or lower coursework, assuming the course has any work at all in it. The
student loan scam provides money for “college credits,” not education, and so
colleges offer loads of useless coursework, producing at best, graduates with
no measurable skills, and, more likely, dropouts…degree or not, they exit
college with student debt, while the administrators nigh give themselves hernias from laughing so
hard at the suckers as they leave.
We’re told
colleges that have such exams are elitist, but the gentle reader should
consider the following:
Just to the
left of that admission in the Sept. 27, 1870, newspaper — a Tuesday — another
frequent advertiser, Columbia College, was spreading the word in its ad that
spots could still be had in its freshman class when classes resumed on Monday,
Oct. 3. Candidates for admission, it stated, would “be received” at the college
that Friday and Saturday, no appointment necessary.
…students without plans in September could
find themselves ensconced in a top-flight university by October…
You could walk into
top schools before the student loan scam, and you didn’t have to jump through
hoops a year or more in advance just to have a slight chance of being accepted
for the “privilege” of going deep into debt…you just had to know things. The
cost of tuition was minimal…if you could do the work. We now give out piles of
student loan money, and those top schools are inaccessible to all but the very
wealthy. The kids that know nothing are free to deeply indebt themselves
forever while going to schools that, well, are the opposite of “top.” This,
regrettably, is the only “benefit” of the student loan scam.
So what’s the takeaway
from the Harvard entrance exam?
That exam could only
exist in a world without the student loan scam. The student loan scam has
warped education, and instead of allowing anyone who wanted an education and
was willing to work for it to get it, we now allow anyone foolish enough to
sign up for debt servitude to get that, instead.
That’s our first
takeaway from the Harvard entrance examination. Next time, I’ll talk about the
implications of the Harvard exam for Common Core, because it’s even more
disastrous than the student loan scam.
Much more disastrous,
by far.
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