As for vice presidents of student diversity, I think they get a bad rap. As college expands to include more than just the children of the rich, you need additional support infrastructure for students: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gr...
Or perhaps colleges simply need to stop admitting students without adequate preparation in the name of "diversity". I'm also uncertain what "diversity" has to do with "children of the rich". Maybe you could explain?
According to the article you link to, the "diverse" students have SAT scores 200 pts lower than average and perform even worse than that SAT gap would predict. It seems a bit unfair to charge students who study for exams extra money simply to pay for extra help to those who don't (e.g., "Vanessa" in the article you link to).
> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.
We're talking about students with similar SAT scores displaying dramatically different graduation outcomes based on parental income. The function of college, especially state colleges, isn't to reward people for being on the ball earlier in life, especially considering how much that has to do with parental education and income. It's to educate the populace, and enable upward mobility within society. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish to not spend money helping lower-income students graduate at the same rate as higher-income students with similar SAT scores. Every low-income student with above-average SAT scores that doesn't graduate college is a huge missed opportunity for the state to put a capable and educated person into the workforce.
The article suggests later on that Vanessa is atypical: To get a better sense of who these struggling students were, Laude started pulling records...almost all of them had low SAT scores — low for U.T., at least — often below 1,000 on a 1,600-point scale.
A 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections (one of them being the "we won't call it remedial" section) is also discussed.
Also, take a look at why Vanessa needed help, at least as per the article's implication: "She failed her first test in statistics...At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying."
You also seem to believe that putting heroic efforts into teaching students thing will somehow help them become a capable worker. That might be true for a few rote fields - perhaps Vanessa's nursing career might be one of them [1]. But except for fields where college is mere rote training in procedures, that's not actually producing capable workers. When I hire, giving me a person who can only learn new things if I invest heroic effort and personal attention is useless - I need my employees to figure things out on their own.
[1] I know little about nursing - from the outside it appears fairly rote, but I'm open to being corrected on this
It's useful to quote the part that comes after that:
> Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T. average.
Individualized help took these students who were scoring 200 points below the rest of the students, and got them to the point where they were scoring comparably to everyone else on exams and graduating at above the average graduation rate. That's a huge success from the state's perspective.
So what if these students came in under-prepared? These kids are often first-generation college students, whose parents have no experience with the whole process and don't inculcate the right values in their kids. The kids from more privileged backgrounds, even ones who aren't any smarter (going by SAT scores), have a leg-up going in due to factors that are mostly in their favor as a result of the parental lottery. Why should that entitle them to a perpetual leg-up?
Near as I can tell, he's devoting more than 10x the resources to this class. Instead of 1 lecturer + 500 students, it's 1 lecturer + 50. Plus 2 hours of extra instruction, so maybe it's 16x resources (assuming chem is normally 3 hours of instruction/week, (5/3)x10 ~ 16). Plus advisers tracking these students, peer mentors, etc.
It's hardly clear that graduating additional marginal students is worth 16x what graduating a normal student is worth. Can you explain why you believe it is?
Lets put the numbers into perspective. Instead of teaching 1 remedial 50 person class, this guy could teach a second 500 person class. 450 additional students could be educated at UT. Why is Vanessa worth more than 10 better prepared students?
It's a calculated expenditure with the expectation of creating future benefits, not just for UT, but for society in general. They're investing in a high-growth segment of the market. We can reasonably assume that the cost to attract and educate a student from a family with a college-going tradition is minimal compared to that of a first-generation student. Furthermore, by graduating a first-generation student, it's possible that a new college-going tradition is started in their existing family or any subsequent families they interact with.
If it's a calculated expenditure, what's the calculation? Something concrete please, not platitudes.
We can reasonably assume that the cost to attract and educate a student from a family with a college-going tradition is minimal compared to that of a first-generation student.
This means we get the most bang for our buck if we focus on the good students, and only consider devoting resources to the bad ones after we exhaust the supply of good ones.
That seems to contradict your idea of a "calculated expenditure".
Your comment is about football but your links discuss subsidies on entire athletic programs. It is well known that more popular sports offset expenses for less popular ones (especially those satisfying title IX) and many times the schools have to subsidize even further. I think you are confusing the expense/revenue ratio of college football with college athletic programs as a whole.
As for vice presidents of student diversity, I think they get a bad rap. As college expands to include more than just the children of the rich, you need additional support infrastructure for students: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gr...