Can we get back to the college closing topic? Seems like there is plenty of interest about the issue you raise above to merit another thread.
The reverse seems to have happened in the high school that I attended decades ago. Back then, there were driver’s ed and auto shop as actual high school classes. These are long gone now.
Health education, including about sex and drugs, was a required one semester course then, and is a required one semester course now. I.e. no expansion that displaced anything else since then.
High school graduation requirements in academic areas like English and math appear to be the same now as they used to be. (The math requirement then and now was and is quite low, however.)
There are more AP courses offered now than back then (some in subjects that were not offered at all back then).
In terms of what students actually took back then, the number of sections of classes got smaller at higher levels in math and foreign language. For science, there number of sections shrank from biology to chemistry to physics. So it is not like “everyone” back then took math through precalculus/trigonometry, foreign language to level 4, or all three of the primary sciences. The notion that this was the case seems like an idealized version of the “good old days”.
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@blossom wrote “But now that HS has driver’s ed as an actual subject, taught during the school day, by an actual teacher who is an employee of the school system. And it’s free. But what classes are those driver’s ed students NOT taking during that period?”
At my high school in the 1970’s, Driver’s Ed was a full semester-long course, taught by a fully-credentialed secondary school teacher. My teacher was the same guy who had taught me 9th grade social studies.
I’ll post one brief thought on whether high school graduation standards have dropped, and then get back to limiting myself to college closings and mergers, per @kbm770’s request.
I’ll agree that high school graduation standards could be higher. The problem is twofold: First, if they were raised you’d see fewer high school graduates, and it would simply change the credentials, not reverse credential creep. And second, high school graduation standards have not dropped over the years; for indirect evidence of this, consider that functional literacy rates have been steadily rising (though admittedly only minimally the past few decades—but crucially, they have not dropped) in the United States throughout the history of public secondary education.
Pioneer Pacific college closing but I’ve seen an article that says its one of their campuses so not sure. As for Oregon Culinary its closing
https://kval.com/news/local/pioneer-pacific-and-oregon-culinary-institute-to-close-doors-07-03-2020
This will be interesting to watch how they will merge some of the PSSHE campuses. Would be interesting to see how Penn State will manage their branch campuses.
PSU, Pitt, and PSSHE schools need to work together, not as independent entities if they want to get this right.
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@chmcnm doubt they will. Remember there is also Temple and Lincoln University. I think they need to start closing some branches as they all have multiple campuses which seem to compete for the same group of shrinking students in Pennsylvania.
They also need to work with the community colleges, since there seems to be needless duplication with PSU and Pitt maintaining what are effectively their own (more expensive to the student) community colleges (the branch campuses).
Pennsylvania has a weird institutional history of duplication of effort, not just in their many parallel systems of higher education. (See, f’rex, the histories of the state’s highway systems.) Unfortunately, having parallel systems means that there are more opportunities for what is effectively political patronage, and so it’s nearly impossible to eliminate the wasted effort. (See, again, the histories of the states highway systems.)
A new community college has just been approved for Erie, PA.
https://papost.org/2020/06/11/pa-board-of-education-approves-community-college-for-erie/
This is not a closure but it seemed thematically relevant.
“UNC System exploring worst-case scenario budget cuts of up to 50%”
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I’m a 5th generation Oregon and grew up in Eugene. And I had to google “Pioneer Pacific University” to figure out what it was because I never heard of it. That should tell you something. According to Niche:
I would say, no big loss.
Pennsylvania is also weirdly larger and more isolated than many other states due to the rugged terrain in most of the state. Distances are much further than in say neighboring Ohio because the roads run diagonal along the mountain valleys and then zig-zag up the and across each ridge. So you have to drive 2-3 times further and often on narrower roads than would be the case in flatter states. And, because it is a much older state with hillier terrain there are far fewer bypasses around towns which makes much slower driving. Penn State would be twice as close to Philly and Pittsburgh if the geography were more like say Texas. And there would be a 6-lane freeway connecting. I knew students, for example, who lived in Waco and would attend classes as daily commuter students at UT in Austin or UT-Arlington in the DFW area. As the crow flies, about the same distance as between Philly and State College. But that sort of daily commute to school would be inconceivable in PA.
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Why am I not surprised. Losing population, median age is over 40, and we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Perfect time to open a school. I really have a love, hate relationship with my home state.
While I know that we are trying to go back to closings, this particular myth lies behind many of the misunderstandings about why colleges are closing, and behind the implications that this has.
The myth of high school curricula becoming fluffier and less rigorous as the reason that people need to go to college is NOT supported by facts. It is, in fact, entirely false.
A. High school graduation requirements, by way of core courses, are higher today than they were in the 1980s or the 1990s:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t152.asp
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_7.asp
B. Driver’s education is not something new which high schools started adding on in the past two decades. It’s something that was around since the 1930s. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED123348.pdf
C. Health education has been part of school curricula since early 20th century, and sex education is part of that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232693/
D. Lessons on correct social behavior have also been part of school curricula since last century. The only difference was that, in the 1950s, they were about the “dangers” of pot and homosexuality. I think that anti-bullying and cybersafety are a good replacement.
E. Classes like art and music have been removed from schools since the 1990s, not added or increased.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/03/us/as-schools-trim-budgets-the-arts-lose-their-place.html
https://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2019/01/17/decline-in-school-arts-programs-follows-funding-drop-but-cuts-arent-equally-felt/
https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1586&context=sjsj
So no, back in our parents’ day, HS kids were NOT spending more time in trigonometry and literature than they are today. In fact, they were spending less time.
In fact, the major reason that people didn’t attend colleges in my parents’ time wasn’t because they had a BETTER high schools education, it was because they did not HAVE a high school education.
High school graduation rates did not reach 75% until the mid 1960s, and HS enrollment only hit 90% in the early 1960s. High school graduates only have been the majority of 18-19 year olds since the late 1950s.
In 1950, fewer than 40% of all students in the 19-24 age range had graduated high school. Since the early 2000s, there have been more than double this percent.
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The 50s were 70 years ago, @MWolf. I don’t think anyone is comparing the level of education in the US population to 75 or 100 years ago. It is undoubtedly true that more people attend and graduate high school now than they did then. It is also undoubtedly true that high school graduates are less capable to demonstrate knowledge on either US or international standardized tests than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago, so the credential of a high school diploma has far less value.
@roycroftmom When @blossom said “back in our parents day” I assumed they surely were talking about the 50s. Also, I am puzzled by your comments on knowledge demonstration on standardized tests. SAT scores have been flat (reading) or gone up (math) since the 70s. PISA scores have stayed basically flat since they started administering PISA, which was 2000. What tests are you referring to?
Anecdotally, I tend to think of a high school diploma as having less value, but thinking about it more carefully, I’m not sure that’s actually true. A high school diploma and hard work can still get you a decent living - it’s just that I want better than decent for my kids. I think I simply have higher income and lifestyle expectations for them than my parents’ generation had for us. It’s hard for me to evaluate though because it’s so subjective.
The SAT tests were re-centered repeatedly, lower, in the last 40 years to accommodate the lower levels of high school achievement. Somewhere on the college board site you can find the process for converting the old scores to the new scores.
The lower trend of SAT scores is due to larger percentages of high school students taking them. Of course SAT scores used to be higher when only the top 10% of high school students went to college decades ago, compared to today when a much larger percentage of high school students go to college.
There was a recentering in 1995: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563025.pdf
The concordance tables for the 2016 redesign are here: https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/higher-ed-brief-sat-concordance.pdf
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