^Just google “harvey mudd shutdown” and read all the relevant articles.
@calmom I took AP Calc in 1973. I think there were even the AB and BC distinctions then, but in my class of 80 only four seniors and one junior took the class. I also took AP Art, AP English and AP Euro and was in an AP French class but didn’t take the exam.
I think both my kids worked harder in college than I did.
Harvey Mudd is an extreme outlier in terms of curricular rigor (the revised curriculum is likely to be more difficult and more work than all but maybe one other US college), so it cannot be taken as a representative example of colleges “across the board”, or even among the most selective colleges.
Professors are in the best positions to judge whether the abilities of their student bodies have deteriorated. Harvey Mudd is not an outlier except that it happened to have commissioned a report (the Wabash Report). In it, significant number of faculty felt current students were less capable than past students. There were also more honor code violations because more students were unable to meet the basic requirements. Apparently, many alumni also felt the same way. The difference between Harvey Mudd and many other selective colleges is that there’s less grade inflation and fewer easy backup majors at Harvey Mudd so the problem became more acute there than most other places.
If you look at the course materials for Harvey Mudd courses like Math 30G (“calculus”), you will see that it is indeed an outlier compared to other colleges in the US.
@mathmom – I graduated from high school in 1970, so my experience predates yours by a few years. I really don’t know when the AP Calc exam was first offered - my only point is that it wasn’t common for students to have AP Calc in those days.
Yes and no. Harvey Mudd indeed had one of most rigorous math curriculums. However, its rigorous math curriculum is exactly what made the issue more apparent and manifested more quickly. At less rigorous colleges or colleges with many easier core curriculum and easier majors, the issue just wouldn’t be as obvious. When Harvey Mudd embarked on its path to achieve more diversity (again, a worthwhile goal) a few years ago, its AOs presumably accepted a more diverse pool of applicants with its previously more rigorous math curriculum in mind. Things evidently didn’t work out the way they thought.
@calmom, don’t disagree there. I was at a prep school where in that class of 80, six went to Harvard, 4 to Yale, 2 to Princeton and many others to other selective colleges. And yet our calc class only had five students! (And no one took an AP course before senior year except the one girl who was an extra year ahead in math.) The school doesn’t send nearly as many girls to HYP now and far more of the girls take calculus.
I.e. HMC is an outlier in curricular rigor.
Or it was an issue all along, but generally ignored.
I.e. HMC is an outlier in curricular rigor.
Therefore, using it as a supposedly representative example of “colleges have gotten easier” “across the board” is not valid.
The decline in reading and writing skills among young people has been both widespread and frequently noted, so I would assume that colleges have modified their curriculum to accommodate the lower skill levels. A much steeper decline should occur in the next 5 years or so, as children of the smartphone age begin to attend college. Even my kids are amazed at the decline in reading skills of those a few years younger. I expect colleges will modify accordingly. I know their high school teachers had to do so.
^The Harvey Mudd example clearly demonstrates the effect of diversity on curriculum rigor. The fact that it was among the most rigorous prior to its pursuit of its diversity goal doesn’t diminish but actually illustrates this effect.
So is the argument that despite admit rates at selective schools having plunged over the past couple of decades (ivies from around 20-25% if i recall the 1980s data correctly to around 5%, schools like UCLA from the 80%s to the teens, actual people I know who have attended ivies telling me their grades would not nearly be sufficient for admission now), they have become easier because this ever-selective group of admits is more diverse than it used to be?
Hmmm. Not sure I can buy that.
And of course the jocks have always had to be able to maintain a minimum gpa.
I don’t disagree with @roycroftmom that reading and writing skills have dropped, but that doesn’t mean courses are easier, whether STEM based ones or more reading-intensive research based ones. Isn’t this why most colleges have compulsory writing courses? One course doesn’t dumb down an entire degree.
Courses have to be easier if skills have dropped and students are still graduating at the same or higher rates. The admission rates really aren’t that determinative-100k kids who don’t read well now apply to a school, rather than the 15k kids who applied a generation ago. They still don’t read well, in fact, less well than before. Perhaps math courses have maintained their level more, but it would seem unlikely. Given the frequent re-centering of the SAT test scores, those admitted today are unlikely to have greater math ability, tho they may have more exposure to math subjects earlier in their careers from high school acceleration.
We had mandatory freshman writing seminars at Cornell 30+ years ago. Even back then students came in with different levels of skills from HS. Unless we move to a universal federal curriculum, there are always going to be big gaps in knowledge base coming into the college/university environment.
FWIW, I took AP calc in HS in the stone ages, along with AP bio, chem, physics, and FL. 5 was considered a lot back then but they were offered. Usually there was one class of about 30 students in the AP courses (out of the hundreds and hundreds of students at my HS). The top 10% of the class went to what today would be considered T20s (although our val took a full ride to an OOS state flagship and then went to an Ivy for law school).
As parents we’re all proud of our kids and predisposed to think that they’re more capable than they actually are. The fact of the matter is our entire educational system isn’t that good. We’re near the bottom among developed countries (even behind many emerging countries) as measured by OCED. Yes, we do produce some top students, but we’re terrible in the middle and at the tail end of the distribution. In STEM subjects, we perform worse, so it isn’t just reading and writing. Unfortunately, the performance discrepancy among different demographic groups is even more pronounced today than it was in the past. By emphasizing diversity at the expense of merits in college admission we have amplified this effect in colleges.
“Computer science college seniors in U.S. outperform peers in China, India and Russia, new research says”
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/19/comparing-skills-computer-science-undergraduates-internationally/
“U.S. Students Have Achieved World Domination in Computer Science Skills—for Now”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/us-students-have-achieved-world-domination-in-computer-science-skillsfor-now
Writing skills being poorer does not equate to skills overall having dropped. An obvious example has been made a few times, where many students now enter college having completed a calculus course whereas that was very rare a few decades back. (Maybe 50K of your 100K kids now have AP calc and another 25K have other APs, when 1K did a generation ago.) I think the logic being presented is false, focusing on writing skills when the substantive content of what students do has improved. Certainly, a number of D19’s AP assignments would have been considered college level -properly college level - in my day.
Writing skills usually reflect critical analysis skills. Math courses have been accelerated, but are the students actually more capable in math? It doesn’t appear to be the case.
Isn’t CS among the least diverse of all college majors? Also, the best and brightest STEM students seem to flock to CS in the US. Almost 40% of all recent incoming students to MIT and Caltech have chosen to major in CS. The number for Stanford, with its much larger humanity and social sciences departments, is about 25%.
“Harvey Mudd is an extreme outlier in terms of curricular rigor”
Harvey Mudd is not an outlier wrt curricular rigor, it’s a pretty standard engineering curriculum, with the exception of the required biology course. This is their core today:
- One course each in computer science and engineering
- One course in biology and a laboratory
- Three semesters of mathematics
- Two and a half semesters of physics and an associated laboratory - One and a half semesters of chemistry and an associated laboratory
- A half-semester of college writing
- A course in Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts
This is exactly what I and hundreds of thousands of engineering students took in the early 80s. Now the outlier is the students, but the curriculum is not.
“Yes, we do produce some top students, but we’re terrible in the middle and at the tail end of the distribution. In STEM subjects, we perform worse, so it isn’t just reading and writing.”
Are you talking about hs or college? Yes hs may be not be good but even the people administering these tests have said that the US college system makes up for the less than average results in high school. After college the US is better, it has the best college system, there’s not even a close second. I recall an article quite a few years ago, that specifically said the community colleges in the US was one of the primary reasons.