So I was very interested in the findings in Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. Bowen, Chingos and McPherson discover something that, to me, was quite a bit more surprising than their findings about undermatching.[1]

Taking timely college completion as their central indicator of college success, they discover not only that high school GPA is a (much much) better predictor of college completion within 4 and within 6 years than ACT or SAT scores, but also that once you control for the high school the students attended, GPA has even more predictive power, and ACT and SAT scores even less. (The study restricts itself to public universities, which they group by selectivity—the predictive power of high school GPA is even larger for the moderately selective 4-year public universities than for the most selective flagships (like Madison, Berkeley, Michigan, etc). Their focus, naturally enough, is on the implications for access to college. Because high school GPA correlates significantly less than ACT and SAT scores with the SES background of students, increasing the relative weight placed on high school GPA would, other things equal, both increase the socioeconomic diversity of public flagships and other selective colleges but would probably improve the completion rates at those universities. (By the way, as bianca pointed out in the earlier thread, and the authors gently suggest, these findings undermine the claim that the beneficiaries of affirmative action are harmed by being placed in universities where they can’t cope).

That high school GPA has considerable predictive power (after controlling for high school attended) within similarly selective institutions (so we’re not talking about the whole range of GPA points) that suggests that, despite having no common examinations, a diffuse curriculum, and little common conversation about standards, high school teachers are doing something fairly systematic in their grading practices. That it has predictive power even without controlling for high school attended suggests the more amazing conclusion that even across high schools grading practices are far from unsystematic. Exactly what they are doing that is systematic is not so clear—they are probably not purely rewarding achievement measured independently of the person who produces it but, as my daughter (and the authors) suspect, rewarding personality traits (traits that, observing the parents around me, they cultivate much more carefully in their daughters than their sons). Here is what the authors say:

Our interpretation…is a simple one. High school grades are such a powerful predictor of graduation rates in part because they reveal mastery of course content. But the “in part” formulation is critically important. IN our view, high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance—as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills—that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program. They are one measure of coping skills and whether a student is likely to “stay the course”. They often reflect qualities such as the ability to accept criticism and benefit from it and the capacity to take a reasonably good piece of work and reject it as not good enough….It is hardly surprising that doing well on a single standardised test is less likely to predict the myriad qualities a student needs to “cross the finish line” and graduate from college.

[1] Disclosure at the end of this post.

[Undermatching] refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive. About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” Mr. Bowen told me.

This would matter less if the students went to schools at which they nevertheless thrive. But some well-qualified students do not go at all. And the advice is to go to at least one of the most demanding schools for which you are well qualified. Schools lower down the pecking order have much lower 4- and 6- year graduation rates:

They could have been admitted to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus (graduation rate: 88 percent, according to College Results Online) or Michigan State (74 percent), but they went, say, to Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent). If they graduate, it would be hard to get upset about their choice. But large numbers do not… In effect, well-off students — many of whom will graduate no matter where they go — attend the colleges that do the best job of producing graduates. These are the places where many students live on campus (which raises graduation rates) and graduation is the norm. Meanwhile, lower-income students — even when they are better qualified — often go to colleges that excel in producing dropouts. “It’s really a waste,” Mr. Bowen says, “and a big problem for the country.” As the authors point out, the only way to lift the college graduation rate significantly is to lift it among poor and working-class students. Instead, it appears to have fallen somewhat since the 1970s.

This part of their study is based on a study of students in North Carolina; but they draw also on the very rich work of the Chicago Consortium (in these studies) which has very similar findings.

Why does it happen? In the comments to the previous post concerns were raised about how the authors control for affordability. In fact, both the authors and the Chicago Consortium studies find that a large plurality of undermatches occur at the application stage—students don’t even apply to the colleges which they would easily get into. And at the levels of income we are talking about differences of financial aid packages makes the differences in the real prices of more and less selective public colleges negligible. In fact selective colleges often fashion packages of aid for highly promising low-income students that make the net price cheaper than they may find at weaker colleges. (This is especially true for students of color at flagship publics.) Unaffordability is not the issue.

Instead, Bowen, Chingos and McPherson say (in the book):

We suspect that the primary forces leading to such high undermatch rates were a combination of inertia, lack of information, lack of forward planning for college, and lack of encouragement

It’s worth reading the Consortium reports for a lot more detail. (And, incidentally, it’s worth reading all the Consortium reports; more on this one later…). But the “lack of information” part of the explanation of undermatching sent me straight back to CT-favourite Annette Lareau’s contribution to Social Class: How Does It Work?. It is the first report I know of the follow-up study she did to Unequal Childhoods (when the children were at the end of high school), in which she explores the process of college applications. One of the working class children, Jessica Irwin, having scored high on the PSATs received a lot of college material, and was a very competitive student.

Although she had wanted to attend Carnegie Mellon, Jessica’s parents vetoed this choice once they learned the tuition. they were unaware that the financial aid packages of private schools can be large enough to wholly or almost wholly off-set the high tuition rates. Nor were they aware that a nearby elite private university offers full scholarships for twenty young people from the Irwin’s home city every year. Jessica ended up attending a small public university.

Both Jessica’s parents had experience of college, and her mother graduated college; they had helped her some in looking at possible universities, but nowhere near as much as the middle and upper-middle class parents in the study. Janice Turner (hat tip: my mum):

When my colleague Alice Thomson wrote this week that you don’t have to be middle-class to be a pushy parent, I really had to laugh. How can you push when you can’t see where you’re going? My folks, who left school at 14, could teach me to read and encourage my studies, but the arcane rules of the educational system were beyond them. (And that was before the terror of debt from student loans.) As one child interviewed for the Milburn report said: “My parents don’t know anything about the application process and it is difficult to understand alone.” Even as a middle-class parent myself, I find this sharp-elbows business difficult, the system opaque. It takes intense application to work out what standard a child must reach at each point and how, by constantly bothering teachers or hiring tutors, to resolve all shortcomings. Meanwhile, there is always some other mother, invariably non-working and vaguely hysterical, who is five smug moves ahead. And to think our pushing days are not done when that Ucas [universal college application] form goes off, but only after we have called in the vaguest favours to blag our darlings a tea-making stint at Goldman Sachs.

[1] Disclosure in previous post.

5. But money is by no means the entire story, perhaps not even the largest part. Student’s choices of where to apply to college are enormously important. A surprisingly large number of students—especially those from poor families and those who are African-American or Hispanic—”undermatch.” That is, they go to less demanding four-year institutions than they are qualified to attend, to two-year colleges, or to no college at all. For example, 59 percent of students in the bottom quartile of family income undermatch; 27 percent in the top quartile do so. In addition, 64 percent of students whose parents have no college education undermatch, compared with 41 percent of those whose parents have college degrees and 31 percent whose parents have graduate degrees (see Figure 3). Undermatching has serious consequences because there is a strong association between institutional selectivity and B.A.-completion rates: Students with essentially the same qualifications who attend more-selective universities have a considerably higher probability of graduating than do comparable students who attend less selective universities. Our data also confirm the results of other studies that show that students whose objective is to earn a B.A. are much less likely to do so if they start at a two-year college (again, other things equal).

6. “Sorting” of applicants by universities, especially overreliance on standardized tests, is consequential and problematic. We are not opposed to testing per se. Standardized tests can be helpful when used in the right ways and in the right settings. They are especially helpful when used with high-school grades to predict college grades at the most selective universities. It is clear, however, that high-school grades are far better predictors of graduation rates, especially at less selective universities. This finding holds even when we do not take account of differences in the quality of the high school that a student attended. Results of achievement tests, especially scores on Advanced Placement tests, are also good predictors. Both grades and achievement-test scores measure not only cognitive achievement but also coping and time-management skills—which, we surmise, affect completion rates.

[1] Full disclosure—one of the authors is a good friend, with whom I co-direct the Spencer Foundation’s Initiative on Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice.

Later Jerry influenced me enormously. I bought Karl Marx’s Theory of History A Defence
as a celebration of getting my degree and read it first on a trip after graduating; I studied it about half-way through graduate school (along with these papers by Levine and Wright, and Levine and Sober), and more than anything else was responsible for my shift away from philosophy of language to political philosophy; because, like most readers of KMTH, I became convinced that the version of Marx’s theory of history that had seemed to me to make political philosophy irrelevant was false. I then read what is still my favourite Jerry paper, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”, and subsequently saw him lecture at UCLA; from then on I guess I read nearly everything he published, as soon as I could get my hands on it.

So now, what I presume is his final book, Why Not Socialism? (UK) (I hope there’ll be other publications – presumably someone, probably one of our readers, is taking responsibility for seeing some of the work that Jerry left unpublished into print) is in my hands. Princeton have deliberately created it to be like On Bullshit – very short, beautifully made, small enough to fit in a smallish pocket. People have been calling it the “camping trip” book; he uses the conceit of a camping trip to demonstrate that organizing social life around the two principles that, for him, define socialism – a very stringent version of equality of opportunity, and a very demanding principle of community – is very appealing to most people in some circumstances. He goes on to demonstrate that the appeal of these principles is not superficial, or restricted to unusual circumstances such as a camping trip, but are appealing at a society-wide level too:

It does seem to me that all people of goodwill would welcome the news that it had become possible to proceed otherwise [i.e. in ways that tapped into our nobler, rather than our more selfish, motives] perhaps, for example, because some economists had invented clever ways of harnessing and organizing our capacity for generosity toward others.

The problem, for Cohen, is that we lack such technology. We should not pretend that we have such a technology, but nor should we pretend that the search for it is futile, or that the lack of it means that the organizing principles of our own society are more appealing than they, in fact, are. (For a fuller description and a critique, of which I’d appreciate some discussion, see Herb Gintis’s review,, already on the amazon page!)

It’s wonderful – if you knew Jerry you can hear him speaking every word. If you didn’t know him, you get a sense of just how serious he was, but also just how funny (after describing the camping trip, he reveals, in an unusually understated way, that he, himself, wouldn’t dream of going camping – “I’m not outdoorsy, or, at any rate, I’m not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-mattress-wise” – but specifies that his question is “ isn’t this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?”. [1] I’ve bought 10 copies to give to various recalcitrant friends and in-laws.

But the book reminds me why I’ve never regretted my stupid decision to miss his lectures. They would have been brilliant, and would almost certainly have redirected me away from my interests prematurely. There’s a small professional reason for being glad that didn’t happen; I appreciate the investment I made in learning how to do core philosophy. But mainly it is personal. Redirected then, I’d have made different choices about, for example, whether or where to go to graduate school. The things that are of real value in my life all turn on that decision – had I not gone to LA when I did, and developed the way I did, I’d not have met my wife and had my kids. Beside them everything else pales, and I still feel a shiver of horror at the thought that I might not have made the choices I did. I know Jerry would understand my lack of regret.

[1] I’m in Jerry’s camp on this, unlike our great mutual friend Erik.

Among the goals that Bok thinks universities should have for students (his main interest is in elite, or as I’ve recently seen them referred to, “Medallion”, colleges, though,much of what he says applies further down the status order of 4 year colleges) and that he thinks they underperform at pretty seriously, is preparing them for a career. He does not mean that colleges fail to provide the credentials necessary for a prestigious career (they certainly do that) nor that they fail to provide relevant education (though he is a little bit skeptical about that). Rather, he thinks that they fail to provide adequate guidance. The consequence is that students are rather ignorant of what different careers involve, what they are likely to do within them, how those careers contribute to the society, and what contribution they would make to their own wellbeing. His particular bete noir (ironically perhaps) is that smart young students with a public service ethic, as well as those who just don’t know what to do with their lives, go to Law School:

For students who begin their legal training hoping to fight for social justice, law school can be a sobering experience. While there, they learn a number of hard truths. Jobs fighting for the environment or civil liberties are very scarce. Defending the poor and powerless turns out to pay remarkably little and often to consist of work that many regard as repetitive and dull. As public interest jobs seem less promising (and law school debts continue to mount), most of these idealistic students end by persuading themselves that a large corporate law firm is the best course to pursue, even though many of them fund the specialties practiced in these firms, such as corporate law, tax law, and real estate law, both uninteresting and unchallenging…..

Imagine the social value that would be produced if these students were, instead, going into teaching and eventually leading urban schools and school districts. As Bok says, we do not yet have a case that letting students apply to Law School by default is bad for them: if they end up enjoying the life more than they would enjoy the more challenging and less well compensated life of a teacher then at least they have been well served. But:

Almost half of the young lawyers leave their firm within three years. Many complain of having too little time with their families, and feeling tired and under pressure on most days of the week. Many more are weary of constantly having to compete for advancement with other bright young lawyers or troubled by what they regard as the lack of redeeming social value in their work. Within the profession as a whole, levels of stress, alcoholism, divorce, suicide and drug abuse are all substantially above the national average.

Bok makes as compelling a case as is possible in the absence of evidence of a kind which, I suspect, would be very hard to gather; his observations certainly fit exactly with my own experience.

So how has this made me change my behaviour? I have written a lot of letters of recommendation for students to go to Law School. Getting a letter of recommendation from me requires submitting a package of materials and meeting with me to discuss one’s goals and the process. Before reading Our Underachieving Colleges, despite my serious reservations about the profession (I’ve known a fair number of lawyers, and I’ve known only one who really enjoyed the job), I never tried to dissuade anyone. I still don’t (just for the CT reader whom I did dissuade, you know, don’t you, that I was not trying). But I do ask them, straight out, “why do you want to go to Law School?”. I am amazed how many students sit there dumbstruck, having never seemed to have given it any thought. I also ask whether they have talked to some lawyers about their jobs, and am similarly amazed how few have done so. Of course, by the time they are asking for a letter it is a bit late to be trying to help them think about a career. But the responses I’ve had suggest to me that Bok’s thesis holds for my institution at least—and that the way we go about thinking about preparing students for a career is extremely laissez faire—much more so than is good for the students, and more than they, who mostly would appreciate some gentle, disinterested, guidance, want.

I’m curious how other people approach writing letters for Law School (or Medical School, or whatever), and whether my experience is idiosyncratic.

I believe that everyone should have equal prospects for a flourishing life; one in which they are able to find fulfillment and contribute to the wellbeing of others, in which they can attain self-knowledge and can act on that, and in which their interdependence with others is tempered by social conditions which prevent those others from tyrannizing them with the arbitrary use of power.

Equality, in this sense, is a centrally important moral value; and only the left, over the past two centuries or so that we’ve had a left, has consistently pursued it. That’s not to say that the movements pursuing equality on any particular dimension are naturally of the left. The pattern tends to be that while a group is struggling for equality on some dimension – think of gender, or sexuality – it is allied to the left in some way, but as it becomes more successful, it ceases to be so closely allied to the left. The recent fracas over whether the Tories or Labour are more gay-friendly is symptom of the success of the gay lesbian and transgendered movement, and as it becomes more successful (as, surely, it will) it will become even less closely connected to the left. What makes the left the left is that whereas each dimension of unjustified inequality (class, gender, race, sexuality) triggers action from some interested parties, the left is concerned with all dimensions.

Equality is not the only important value. If it were necessary to diminish everyone’s life in order to attain equality, I’d oppose doing so, and operationally, in the highly unequal societies we know, the left rightly prioritizes improving the lives of those whose prospects are least over trying to achieve equality. Personal liberties contribute a great deal to human wellbeing by enabling people to live by their own judgments, and protecting them from the arbitrary power of others, and it is usually an error to countenance undermining personal liberties for the sake of equality; because doing so jeopardizes the preconditions for the flourishing we want to see equality of. Among the most vexing issues that face the left today concern culture – the deep ties of ethnicity, religious belief, and nationality, which simultaneously support and threaten people’s ability to live their lives in ways that support their wellbeing.

The left doesn’t ever have some beautifully crafted set of reform proposals that would, if implemented, endure the end goal of an equal society. During some historical periods – think of the post-World War II period or Eastern Europe in the late 1980s – radical change is possible, as long as the political skill and will and institutional imagination are there to make it happen. In other periods all we can do is limit the damage to our goals (I think the 1980s were like this, and would have been even if Labour had been in government). In yet others, what is possible are incremental and scattered changes that create specific improvements (I think this characterizes the past 15 years and I’m optimistic enough to hope that it characterizes the next 15). Even in these periods, political will, skill, and institutional imagination are needed, and they are needed regardless of who is in government. If the Conservatives win the next election they will do some things that advance the cause of equality, and the Left should identify and support those things, while opposing, or trying to amend to make less harmful, other things. There will also be space – there always is in a modern democracy – to improve things in small ways in local government, through NGOs and, for those people with certain kinds of jobs, within schools, hospitals, businesses, etc. Making small improvements within the available spaces is almost always better than doing nothing in anticipation of big changes later on.

And the entire opening episode of Sir Prancelot:

Horrible Histories (the best thing currently on television in Britain?) takes a less jingoistic view of Britain than the Ladybird Books—the 3 minutes history of the British Empire is, alas, not yet up on youtube, but there’s plenty else there: Witchfinders Direct; Christians versus Lions; Born 2 Rule; etc.

Btw, according to wikipedia, not only was Titus Oates not really called Titus (I always thought it was odd that there were two of them), but he disliked Scott intensely, which makes the whole thing seem even more tragic.

Ladybird Books play an integral part in the prehistory of CT (and, as my daughter points out, in the upbringing of her monstrous brother).[1] Above are the covers of the two that my father recited over and over again to me as a kid (and that we recite to the little horror in turn). Very different; whereas Piggly is a ne’er do well, Downy is punished for good deeds (but—spoiler alert—is rescued at the last minute). Almost unknown in the US (though, in one of the odder moments in my marriage, I was being entertained by my wife’s former boyfriend’s parents when I happened upon Piggly on one of the bookshelves where they were keeping books in preparation for the hoped-for grandchildren). Anyway, in addition to the addictive Boys and Girls: A Ladybird Book of Childhood (UK), we now have beautiful prints of the above to adorn the little horror’s room, courtesy of this amazing service. For Piggly, only the cover is available; but every single page of Downy is available. Quite who wants to adorn their house with prints of every single page of Peter and Jane I’m not sure; but I can quite see it with this one (my favourite below the fold).

And here’s the link to Valerie Singleton self-parodying brilliantly.

[1] CB’s initial post is once more lost to posterity.

[1] His wikipedia page suggests that Cruddas visited my department for a while in the 1980’s, in which case he is probably the second most eminent former visitor we’ve had—according to department legend, this guy once shared an office for a whole semester with my retired but excellent colleague Dennis Stampe.

I’m curious where this will go. It seems like nobody’s eye is really on NCLB, and understandably so. The Secretary of Education, I note, was an initial signer of the Broader Bolder initial statement, so perhaps they have real influence. I hope so. I regret I can’t be at the event, but urge anyone who’s in DC to attend. I’ll link to the report when it goes public.

It’s always hard to know whether a collection like this will be widely read. Even a good volume, which this one certainly is, is really targeted to scholars. But in this case, because almost all the essays direct themselves to arguments and themes expressed in just two accessible books (Justice, Gender, And The Family and Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?), and because Okin’s work was so closely tied to important themes in mainstream political philosophy, the volume could very sensibly be used in an upper division undergraduate course in Political Philosophy or Feminism.

As I say, all the essays I’ve read are very good and break new ground without abdicating the task of engaging with central themes in her work. I wanted to say a couple of words about two of them that I’ve found particularly useful. The first is Mary Shanley’s essay “No more relevance than one’s eye color”, which takes the various of Okin’s formulations of what genderlessness would consist in, and subjects them to close scrutiny, as well as looking at the sketches of proposals that Okin makes to achieve genderlessness. The other is Joshua Cohen’s “A Matter of Demolition”. Cohen’s review of Justice, Gender and the Family was one of those reviews that really is a fully developed research paper, and took her to task for several things, including what he saw as her being too quick in her dismissal of libertarianism, and her failure to interrogate adequately what Sandel means by saying that the family is “beyond justice”. He revisits these issues, and another dispute between them which concerned the extent of her embrace of the public private distinction (in the review he said she embraced it, whereas she disputed the extent of her embrace). The essay is really wonderful for two things. One is the continuing of the conversation, in which he gives some ground to Okin, but shows that even if she is wrong about some of the specifics, her method of asking about a theory “well, what if it tried to take gender and family life seriously” was illuminating and fruitful. The other is that the paper is, to me at least, quite moving. He opens with an unusually candid admission that he and Okin’s last interactions were not good ones, subtly implying that there was blame for this on both sides, and expressing unmawkish regret at this – a good warning to readers that life is too short to hope that fences will magically be mended sometime in the future—following by an intellectually honest and sharp tribute to the person with whom he cannot renew his friendship.

Anyway, highly recommended.