The Speculist

I think the problem many people are running into is that it is merely a 3 part essay and not a book. Murray can only paint with a broad brush which makes it easy to nitpick and impute motives and thoughts he doesn't have.

Murray's arguments are similar to those put forward by Jerry Pournelle. I'd urge to do go swimming through his site and the many many conversations that have been had on the subject.

While Murray does make some general recommendations for government policy including increasing access to vocational schooling and giving gifted youngsters a more rigorous education it seems clear that he doesn't draw many bright lines.

For example, he makes a case that it is valuable to have high IQ people who don't go into University. On the other hand, I don't remember seeing any recommendations that lower IQ students be barred from higher education.

Instead it seems to me that he is focusing on outcomes and saying that our current system produces poor outcomes due to poor design. Further, this poor design is mandated by a society that overvalues college education while undervaluing people with technical skills. A culture that looks down on plumbers but applauds the philosophy grad working at Starbucks has some skewed priorities as far as I'm concerned. I think this section is the primary argument of the entire series:

"They [lower IQ students] are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.

Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient."

For most students we need to move away from the 4 year college racket. Innovative approaches to getting students from high school into a profession are needed. One thing I think we will be seeing is the availability of books and course lectures on line for free/cheap with a network of schools available to test out in different courses. We are moving in this direction already. But, in the end, I think we will see this approach taking down "old education" the way new media is taking down the old media.

If you think the argument he makes is flawed then feel free to critique it. But I would much rather people take on Murray's stated arguments rather than arguments they imagine Murray is making.

My conception of NCLB is that just about every kid should be able to achieve basic competence, not that every kid should go to college. Today's failing schools are not accomplishing this.

Beyond that, it's time to adapt education to the needs of individual kids. We should invest heavily in the gifted not because it's their right, but because it pays huge societal dividends over time.

We should support those whose motivation exceeds their gifts simply because great things happen when we do.

I think Murray's (and Pournelle's) arguments about college are hopelessly out of date. These guys seem to picture a quaint, mid-20th century world where an elite few get higher education while the rest of us become auto mechanics and factory workers.

Putting up an IQ-based barrier such as Murray suggests is ridiculous. A college education only "makes sense" for the 15% of the population with an IQ over 110? I would tend to ask how many college educated people do we need, and how smart do people need to become?

Murray and Pournelle want to preserve the integrity of what a college education is, and they want to avoid having people pushed into activities for which they are ill suited. Those are both good ideas. But meanwhile, people are getting smarter and virtually all employment is becoming more information-centric.

The comments above about providing new educational options seem right on track to me. Rather than a binary college / no-college decision point, we need a range of educational options that work for a rapidly changing world.

And yes, this should include better options for the gifted. But I think it will be interesting to see how well the free market of information that we call the Web addresses all of these problems, as opposed to various government programs. I think we'll see less emphasis on certification of education, and more emphasis on assessing whether an individual knows what he or she needs to know in order to succeed.

If 25% of the population (stretching things a bit) ought to go to college, and 45% of high school graduates do go to college, then isn't that about right? After all, a significant percentage do not graduate from high school. The proportions look pretty good to me, with about the right amount of slack for the over achievers to gain access.
Not that a lot more focused and trades oriented education wouldn't be a very good idea for the clearly identified bottom 1/3, but that's a problem with high schools, not colleges.