Two new studies: We need to send more kids to college. They’ll fare better and so will the state of Georgia

Every child is entitled to a choice, when reaching the cusp of adulthood. Adults making those choices for them are not always looking out for there best interest.

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We definitely need to keep building up the perception that an individual isn’t as good as the next unless s/he has a college degree. Goodness knows, I don’t want to hire a plumber who got her/his training at a technical school. Vocational options in high school give tech school bound students an opportunity to be sure they’re entering a profession they like. In some cases, with articulated courses, students can actually earn tech school credit while in high school (like dual enrollment for the college students). Without a skilled labor force (i.e., without a college degree), manufacturing jobs that require such employees will continue to be outsourced. Is it really necessary that your taxi driver have a post-secondary degree. Oh, wait a minute, most of them aren’t from here anyway.

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“So, tell me again why we need more vo-tech classes and fewer college bound students?”

First off, yes, higher education is a good thing for individuals, and the state. However, despite whatever studies you toss out there, the fact remains that all students are NOT college material, yet our public school system wants to treat them as if they are. And without a vo-tech option, these are the ones dropping out.

It’s nice and rosy to promote the idea that “all students can go to college”…and then there’s the reality, but let’s not let that get in the way.

And what is the mission of the Lumina Foundation? From their website: “Lumina’s goal is to increase the percentage of Americans who hold high-quality degrees, credentials and certificates to 60 percent by 2025.” OK…that’s a worthy cause. And maybe that’s why the title of their study is, “A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education”. Anybody surprised that the outcome of the study just so happens to support the foundation’s goal? What did you think the study would show?

Yeah, I know…I’m a cynic.

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“I have run into a sizable contingent arguing that we send too many kids to college already. There has been a steady drum beat for more vocational options because ‘not all students are meant for higher education.’”

They’re right. Not all high school students are meant for higher education.

In the first place, consider the law of supply and demand. The reason people with degrees make more money is that not everyone has degrees. If everyone did have degrees, then having a degree would be like having a high school diploma. What degrees have been doing is telling the employers who are the more able among those who apply for jobs that require the skills imparted by education. If you universalize degrees, employers will have to find another way to determine who the best people are. What you won’t do is make it possible for everyone to earn a million extra inflation-adjusted dollars.

In the second place, consider what you’d have to do to universalize college degrees. Among other things, you’d need to dumb down the standards, to weaken the conditions under which those degrees are granted, so that more members of lower-IQ races would find a degree within their intellectual reach. Again, this would simply devalue the possession of a degree, and employers would have to find another way to figure out who can do their mentally demanding jobs, as opposed to who merely had a college degree, which will have come to signify nothing.

In the third place, why should anyone pay more taxes to supply someone else’s kid with tuition money? If YOU feel so charitable, then YOU do it. But in all events, please leave my money alone.

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I think sometimes we look down on vo-tech schools without realizing what the schools offer. We tend to jump to the conclusion that it is just a place to get a nail tech or plumbing license. Technical colleges actually have a wide variety of options that include articulation agreements with many 4 year colleges (Southern Poly, GA Tech, NGCSU, West GA, etc.).

I think we should steer more students toward the local technical colleges. Like it or not, even with HOPE, many students can’t afford college. Especially if they have to live on campus. There are many parts of this state where commuter access to a four year school is difficult. However, most technical colleges have been strategically placed throughout the state allowing for easier access.

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The sad truth is that many students in Georgia are just too stupid to go to college. Georgia is a cesspool, a pit of uneducated, ignorant rednecks who salivate like Pavlov’s dog at the sight of a football.

I’m so glad that I don’t live in Georgia any longer. My child is free of mediocrity. Free at last.

Hope I never come back.

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@ ScienceTeacher671 Amen! Students arrive to us in the 6th grade woefuly unprepared as well. I have students who passed the CRCT in the 5th grade who cannont consistently spell their own name correctly. They are not special needs students. When I point out their mispelled name, they look at it, scrunch their eyes up for a while, and then say, “Oh yeah…I forgot!” How can one possible forget how to spell their own name?

The legacy of NCLB is that we are going to have an entire generation of students who are very, very passive about their education. They expect for their teachers to work themselves to death making sure the standards are covered in an entertaining manner while they sit there waiting to take a test over and over again until they get an acceptable grade. Very few of them study or take notes in class. Why bother when teachers are being forced by administration to give limitless numbers of retakes on tests?

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College for everyone…hmmm…too many default on their student loans and college ISNT for everyone. Example? Look at Obama…he went to college and still remains a stupid fool.

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I can’t tell if you are making a distinction between postsecondary education/postsecondary credentials, and college.

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“So, tell me again why we need more vo-tech classes and fewer college bound students?”

In a perfect world, we need more 17-18 year olds that can meet the academic rigors of college. The problem is the mindset that if you don’t get into a college, you’re a failure. Parents expect their little boys and girls to get into Harvard and then begin blaming their child’s teachers and the school when they receive a B or a C. This inevitably leads to grade inflation, and hurts the population as a whole when Johnny walks into Georgia Tech as a freshman and has never learned how to study for a test.

We should be following China’s model. Identify the high-achievers and send them to different schools.

We don’t need more vo-tech classes and fewer college bound students. What we NEED to do is remove the stigma from community colleges and technical colleges.

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Catlady, I agree with your point about most of the difference being semantics. The perception of post-secondary education should include vo-tech as well as academic diplomas and degrees. I definitely want the electrician who wires my house or the mechanic who fixes my car to have the training and education to do the job right the first time.

I’ve traveled both routes, myself. After high school graduation in 1981, I went to a vo-tech business school and learned the bookkeeping and office skills necessary to get a job and to do that job correctly. The last thing my company needed was someone untrained playing around with their financial information or business documents. My company depended on me and I depended on the skills and training I received through my vo-tech post-secondary education. I earned my formal accounting degree several years later, and now am finishing up my ECE degree as a mid-life career changer.

What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is for vo-tech post-secondary education to be truly valued by our society. Until it is valued and respected on par with “college” education, we’ll continue to have these arguments. The debate is, however, mostly semantics.

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Hypothetically, if every student got a college degree somehow (not possible of course), who would employ them all?

Educrats think every student should be the next ceo.

You thought illegal immigration was bad now, wait till everyone is TOO good to do the service jobs we need to keep things running.

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There are many articles out there now explaining that higher ed is in an unsustainable finance bubble that, like housing, will collapse.

Here’s a succinct link to an article that refutes most of what Maureen has asserted and raises the points others are making here http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/100751.html

Finally a plumber or electrician always has demand for their work and the jobs cannot be exported overseas. It’s not as prestigious though or as much fun for the students as football games and the Greek system.

How many kids these days have a very expensive college degree and have learned mostly how much they like having a good time and living well and not working too hard? Now find a lucrative job and start paying off that debt.

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I agree that post secondary training of some sort is necessary, but would argue vehemently that college is not the answer for everyone. We have so degraded the value of an academic degree that now we have companies requiring a BA or BS in almost anything as a pre-requisite for entry level positionsthat, in the past, required nothing more than a HS diploma or a bit of commercial or technical education. We need to erase the stigma of vocational training!

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@ David Sims

“Among other things, you’d need to dumb down the standards, to weaken the conditions under which those degrees are granted, so that more members of lower-IQ races would find a degree within their intellectual reach.”

What a racist statement. I’m surprised, not really, that no one else has called you on it.

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It’s funny because NO ONE finds fault with jobs, career or occupations that don’t necessary require the skills of a college educated person; however, when the advertisement is placed, that’s the expectation.

Also, people without college education are stuck when it comes to advancement in the workplace. You might not need a college education to work in a call center, but to get out of the call center at 35 you are told you don’t qualify because the only road to advancement is a bachelors degree.

The same thing goes for a garbageman who wants to move into management of his department or team after 15 to 20 years on the job.

Many of these people, who are held back due to their education, have more knowledge of the job and expereince than the college educated people who are put in those positions.

Education is the most important thing in life, regardless of where you start out; unless you want to sell yourself short at 25,000 a year for 30 to 40 years.

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Maureen, any idea of the called meeting at the GABOE is about?

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While your statistics indicate that getting a “higher” education increases the odds of success later in life, the statistics do not take into consideration the fact that not all students are college material. For those that are not college bound, we need to provide vocational education and skills training that will enable them to enter the workforce with the confidence that they will be competetive in the job market and have the ability to provide a good living for their families. Providing students the opportunity for skills training in high school and technical college also gives them direction and challenges them to excell.

I would much rather be pro-active and face the fact that a good number of high school students will not be attending college and give them career choices and the necessary training to excell than to stick my head in the sand and ignore those that do not attend college and focus all my efforts on only those that do attend college.

If you have any doubts as to the merits of providing skills training, please take the time next spring to attend the Career Expo that the Construction Education Foundation of Georgia along with Skills USA hosts for Georgia’s students. Or at least visit our website at CEFGA.org to learn more about why we should provide more opportunities for skills training for Georgia’s students. You have my email address, I invite you to contact me for more information or to discuss the merits of vocational education for Georgia’s students.

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The truth is every student doesn’t need to go to college. I’ve actually shared with my children that the expectation is that they learn a skill that allows them to be independent. That means that if they choose to go to college that’s fine, but if they choose to attend a technical school, that’s fine too. My brother is a truck driver and earns just as much, actually more, than I do. He chose to drop out of college. I stayed, earned advanced degrees and guess who ends up earning more?

We need a skilled workforce. It doesn’t have to be a 4 year college degree.

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PS … Yes, I’m on my lunch break.

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PBM,

David Sims admitted he was a racist on the Father Boards School Bus blog. Look at page two. I called him on it, and he admitted to being a white supremacist.

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@V for Vendetta. Well, now. I admit to being a racist because I am a racist. You wouldn’t want me to lie, would you? However, I did not say that I was a white supremacist. There are very few supremacists among white racists, despite the habitual misuse of the term by the mainstream media.

A racial supremacist wants other races to be the slaves of his race. The white racists in America don’t want that. We recognize that slavery was a grave mistake, without which we’d be much better off today because there wouldn’t be any blacks here.

White racists are separatists. They don’t want to enslave. They want to partition. The term “white separatist” is accurate. The term “white supremacist” is inaccurate. The mainstream media, which is largely owned by Zionist Jews, continually misuses the word supremacist in referring to white racists in order to instill confusion and hatred among non-white groups.

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@Proud Black Man. You’re a liar. You are a coward who hides behind a screen name.

My real name is David Sims.
Kevin Strom is someone else.
I have never been convicted of a sex crime.
I have never been convicted of -any- crime other than traffic violations.

Proud Black Man, you have a bad habit, and it is going to get you into trouble. Libel is a felony, and you are now at least five times guilty.

Quote from http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_states_criminal_libel_web_internet.htm
“Internet libel is a felony! Many people on the web think that privacy laws protect their anonymity, but that’s not the case when criminal charges are filed. Google’s motto is “Do no evil” and they are cooperating with law enforcement to help prosecute crooks by introducing their Google searches as evidence.”

What do you want to bet that an attorney can’t find you if I hire one to do so?

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@CW. Documenting the costs of illegal immigration is so easy that I’m surprise you didn’t simply type “cost of illegal immigration” into a web search and get the information for yourself. It would be best for you to do that, so that this discussion doesn’t take off on a long tangent, such as the one PBM and I inflicted on the discussion following “Are the feds in any better position to figure out whether some APS schools cheated on the CRCT?”

I’ll give you these links just to get you started:

Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. $113 Billion a Year. State’s “cheap labor” costs average household $1183 a year.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/02/immigration-costs-fair-amnesty-educations-costs-reform/

There’s a newsletter being circulated that exaggerates this cost to $340 billion per year. The cost isn’t yet that high, but, on the other hand, the actual cost is within an order of magnitude of that, and might reach it in a few years.

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecentersf134

Quote: “At that time [1996], the illegal alien population was estimated to be about five million persons. The estimated fiscal cost of those illegal aliens to the federal, state and local governments was about $33 billion. This impact was partially offset by an estimated $12.6 billion in taxes paid to the federal, state and local governments, resulting in a net cost to the American taxpayer of about $20 billion every year. This estimate did not include indirect costs that result from unemployment payments to Americans who lost their jobs to illegal aliens willing to work for lower wages. Nor did it include lost tax collections from those American workers who became unemployed. The study estimated those indirect costs from illegal immigration at an additional $4.3 billion annually. During the years since that estimate, the illegal alien population is estimated to have roughly doubled, so the estimated fiscal costs also will have at least doubled. Furthermore, the passage of time is accompanied by inflation in the costs of services, e.g., school budgets continue to climb. Therefore, what was estimated to be a cost to the American taxpayer of $33 billion in 1996 today would be at least $70 billion. Similarly, tax collections would have increased — sales taxes at least — so that the net expense to the taxpayer from illegal immigration would currently be at least $45 billion. The indirect fiscal costs would have also increased, especially during a period of already high unemployment, to perhaps and additional $10 billion annually.”

Illegal Immigration Costs California $10.5 Billion Annually
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/immigrationnaturalizatio/a/caillegals.htm

Quote: “Among the key finding of the report are that the state’s already struggling K-12 education system spends approximately $7.7 billion a year to school the children of illegal aliens who now constitute 15 percent of the student body. Another $1.4 billion of the taxpayers’ money goes toward providing health care to illegal aliens and their families, the same amount that is spent incarcerating illegal aliens criminals.” (This is just in California.)

Quote: “California’s addiction to ‘cheap’ illegal alien labor is bankrupting the state and posing enormous burdens on the state’s shrinking middle class tax base,” stated Dan Stein, President of FAIR. “Most Californians, who have seen their taxes increase while public services deteriorate, already know the impact that mass illegal immigration is having on their communities, but even they may be shocked when they learn just how much of a drain illegal immigration has become.”

From these sources, you find a range for what illegal immigration costs Americans each year, with a low estimate of $55 billion and a high estimate of $113 billion. The US labor force has something like 100 million to 110 million workers, so the cost of illegal immigration to the average employed American is around $550 to $1100 per year. In California, the cost is near the top of that estimate (or perhaps even a bit higher). In other US states, the cost may be somewhat less, as some of the services come from the state, rather than from the federal government.

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“Two new studies: We need to send more kids to college. They’ll fare better and so will the state of Georgia”

Both technical and two year schools. I agree with this statement 100%

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John Barge, candidate for superintendent, is running on a campaign that “one size does not fit all”. He has a realistic understanding of education unlike the career politician also running.

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I guess if this statement is true : “58 percent of Georgia’s jobs will require postsecondary education by 2018″ we need to plan for another invasion by Yankees.

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Glad to see George Leef weigh in. He did a great job on this issue arguing against Kati Haycock’s “College for Everyone” last year at an ed conference here in GEorgia.

He has done some great work through The Pope Center on this precise issue.

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Thanks to Attentive Parent for the kind words and mention of my organization. I have often sparred with representatives of the higher education establishment and debated their idea that getting more young people through college is a national imperative. Anyone who would like to read more will find a lot of information at our site: http://www.popecenter.org.

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I worked at SREB for five years and came to know Gene Bottoms fairly well. He is very passionate about high-quality career/technical programs for students, starting in high school and moving into the post-secondary arena. He’s been doing this since the early 70s.

I often reviewed a number of reports that came from visits to various middle and high schools across the country. Unfortunately, many schools are lacking when it comes to preparing young people for career/technical careers because the mantra of “must attend a four-year liberal arts college” is being shoved down throats more and more. The “vocational” track is viewed as the basement where kids with poor grades are dumped to sit it out until graduation, if they make it that far.

There are, however, some schools that have embraced the wisdom of preparing young people for high-paying, highly-skilled career/technical jobs. Many of them are in the northeast and are devoted to offering high-level, technical jobs in HVAC, automotive and electrical fields. Many of these kids even come out with certifications in these fields with their eyes toward getting more training in a two-year or four-year setting. These kids have more math/science skills than many four-year liberal arts college grads and make a lot more money.

There are glimmers of this here and there in other areas of the country, including Georgia, but unfortunately, it gets drowned out by the notion that every single young person must fit into some mold decided by some “experts” in higher education who rarely step foot in a classroom.

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@Writer Gal.

High school math problem.
Known: G,M, a, and r.
Find: v.
v² = GM(2/r − 1/a)

College math problem.
Known: G, M, a.
Find: t(r)
(dr/dt)² = GM(2/r − 1/a)

Show me why the sensible mediocrities in high school would excel more in solving the implied differential equation in the college math problem than the high school whiz kids would. I’d like to hear your reasoning. If you are a sensible mediocrity yourself, then you might want to give it a go.

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well the ROOT of the problem is not personal attacks; but the writings to answer Mareen’s orginial question- “So, tell me again why we need more vo-tech classes and fewer college bound students?”
and I think we have given her some of those answers.

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zzzzzzhuh?

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You forget that we are a social species. As much as you would like to discount the fact, that is written into our DNA. Social skills are the grease that makes our wheels go round and round. The titans of Wall Street or the 100 Senators who run our country could probably not perform many high level math functions either, but they are masters of a complex set of social skills.

I have the utmost respect for higher level thinking skills. My husband is an internationally recognized molecular biologist, and I taught highly gifted students for 11 years – ones that went on to Princeton and Yale and Harvard and majored in physics, computer science, math, biology, theoretical chemistry, etc. How nice it would be if the world ran on mathematics and science. But as long as we’re human that won’t happen. How tidy it would be if we could simply categorize groups of people into races and gender. But that’s not reality. I’ve taught students of both genders and all races, colors and creeds. There are differing abilities within our species, but discounting whole groups of people is not efficient. After teaching over a thousand gifted students, I understand that intelligence comes in all sizes, colors, genders, and personalities. Generalizations ensure you miss some of the best minds. That’s the one thing we can’t afford to do as a country.

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Check out the Georgia Association for Career & Technical Education website: http://www.gacte.org

They are doing some very innovative things working with career & technical teachers all across Georgia. The Georgia Legislature and Department of Education need to do more to support our career & technical education programs, students, and teachers. Its time to turn the focus from HOPE Scholarships for all to career & technical education for all students including “college prep” kids. All students need CTE!

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I heard Matthew Gambill speak about career and technical education at the Georgia Association for Career & Technical Education Summer Conference last July. There were over 2,000+ career and technical educators in attendance. CTE is picking up a lot of momentum in Georgia. Gene Bottoms at SREB has done a great job promoting the programs as well.

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@Dekalbite. That’s pretty standard liberal apologetics. Here’s my reply.

No white racist seriously argues that there is no such thing as a smart black. Racial differences aren’t a matter of all versus nothing. Rather, they’re matters of more and less. Depending on which racial difference we’re talking about, it might be a little more versus a little less, or substantially more versus substantially less, or incomparably more versus incomparably less.

If you want to know the facts about something, study it. Look at it carefully. Examine it MUCH. That means you must not limit yourself to your personal experience, because that is too limited for a proper judgment to be made. Anecdotes have some value, but statistical summaries of a great many studies have much more value.

When such studies were done on racial differences in intelligence, the researchers found that the distribution of intelligence, as measured by IQ test scores, show an almost normal distribution within each race. One of the ways you can tell that you have more than one race in a sample, without looking at the people in it, is by noticing that the distribution of their IQs isn’t normal, but skewed or bimodal.

Over more than half a century, psychometricians in the United States have worked to find the normal distributions that most nearly characterize the country’s white and black residents. And the latest results that I know about are these:

White IQ distribution: 103 ± 16.4

Black IQ distribution: 85.0 ± 12.4

The averages in those distributions comes from “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability” by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen, published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 235-294. The standard deviations in the distributions comes from a 1963 study by Kennedy, Van De Riet, and White.

To generate percentages of a race that have IQs above a specified figure, you must integrate the “bell curve” for that race’s IQ distribution from the specified minimum IQ to positive infinity. The general equation is

P = {1/[σ√(2π)]} ∫(IQ,+∞) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

For whites,
W = {1/[16.4√(2π)]} ∫(IQ,+∞) exp{ −[(x−103)/16.4]²/2 } dx

For blacks,
B = {1/[12.4√(2π)]} ∫(IQ,+∞) exp{ −[(x−85)/12.4]²/2 } dx

Of all American whites, only about 5% would qualify for the job if the IQ minimum were 130. However, only one US-resident black in 7030 (about 14 thousandths of one percent) would qualify. Given equal numbers of American whites and US-resident blacks (in a large, randomly selected group of job applicants), there would be 350 times more qualified whites than qualified blacks.

To follow is a chart showing the White-to-Black Qualified Job Applicant Ratio for qualifying minimum IQs ranging from 100 to 140.

IQ=100. Whites exceeding: 57.257228%. Blacks exceeding: 11.320135%. Ratio W/B: 5.1
IQ=105. Whites exceeding: 45.146883%. Blacks exceeding: 5.338277%. Ratio W/B: 8.5
IQ=110. Whites exceeding: 33.475184%. Blacks exceeding: 2.189324%. Ratio W/B: 15.3
IQ=115. Whites exceeding: 23.217361%. Blacks exceeding: 0.777403%. Ratio W/B: 29.9
IQ=120. Whites exceeding: 14.996457%. Blacks exceeding: 0.238194%. Ratio W/B: 63.0
IQ=125. Whites exceeding: 8.988502%. Blacks exceeding: 0.062809%. Ratio W/B: 143.1
IQ=130. Whites exceeding: 4.984674%. Blacks exceeding: 0.014224%. Ratio W/B: 350.4
IQ=135. Whites exceeding: 2.551547%. Blacks exceeding: 0.002762%. Ratio W/B: 923.7
IQ=140. Whites exceeding: 1.203226%. Blacks exceeding: 0.000459%. Ratio W/B: 2619.5

Those ratios in the rightmost column are the ratios you’d expect to find in the labor force for jobs having intellectually demanding requirements, on the condition that there were equal numbers of applicants from both races. However, on average in the United States, Whites outnumber Blacks by a ratio of about six. So in actual practice, where mentally challenging jobs really are apportioned in accordance with employee merit, the ratio of Whites to Blacks would be six times larger than the ratio in that rightmost column.

For all jobs requiring a minimum IQ of 130 for satisfactory performance, there would be (on average in the United States) about 2100 whites hired for each black hired.

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Talking points from your favorite pseudo-scientists as seen in amren.com. We have an educated racist on our hands. Lot of time between pizza deliveries huh? Btw you are influencing no one.

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@Jacky,

i want to clear up any confusion about GA graduation tracks. There is only ONE graduation track and it is College prep. There is suppose to be only ONE Math track; but when the DOE saw the Math II EOCT scores they quickly rearranged things so students could take Math III support (a grad test prep class) and then take Math III in their senior year. The education debate on the national level that NBC and others are covering have even stated that a “one size fits all” curriculum does not work; BUT, what does GA have? EVERY WHERE AROUND THE WORLD there are school systems that have many different tracks to graduation.

I have not seen or heard ONE state representive ask an educator what are some ideas that could be done to save money and help more students graduate.

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Lt. Governor Casey Cagle has spent $48 million dollars since 2007 building “Career Academies.” While they are nice facilities in theory…reality is the state does not have have enough money nor do local systems to build a career academy in every school system in the state. Why are we REINVENTING THE WHEEL??? Lets use the existing career and technical programs that exist already in every high school in the state and require that all high school students take a sequence of career and technical courses? Lt. Governor Cagle is to be commended for his efforts but Career Academies will only reach a small audience of students. Lets broaden the scope.

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Check out Jan Bray’s interview from the Today Show yesterday with Kathie Lee Gifford. Jan is the Executive Director of the Association for Career & Technical Education and she talks about modern day career and technical education programs.

http://www.educationnation.com/index.cfm?objectid=9E1D1D1E-CB29-11DF-8853000C296BA163&aka=0

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@V for Vendetta. IQ is, pretty much, a fixed and unchanging quantity. Many people confuse IQ with acquired mental skills, such as the ability to finish a game of MineSweeper in a short time. When anyone first starts to play that game on the “intermediate” difficulty level, his time to finish is usually around three or four minutes. But as he continues to play, his game times grow briefer, until, usually after about two weeks of frequent playing, he is completing a game in under 60 seconds.

Does that mean his intelligence increased? No. What it means is he used the intelligence he had to acquire a mental skill, which will remain with him as long as he continues to play MineSweeper on the intermediate level at least once daily.

What more nearly measures the player’s intelligence is the shortest time in which he can consistently finish a game of MineSweeper. That briefest finishing time partly reflects the extent to which he can hone the relevant mental math and logic skills by practicing them. I said “partly” because other factors become important as the playing time decreases. But, sooner or later, the player will reach is point of diminishing returns on invested time in practice. His intelligence influences where that point is, as does his reflex speed and muscular coordination.

Intelligence isn’t a skill. It’s an inborn, heritable characteristic of the brain related to its information capacity, to its information transfer efficiency, and to its ability to acquire, interpret, and relate new information as it becomes available.

Your belief regarding the lower IQ scores of “socioeconomically disadvantaged populations…regardless of race” is a common liberal attempt to hide the racial gaps in IQ.

It’s true that the higher SES groups have somewhat higher IQs than the lower SES groups do, but your opinion that the money leads and the IQ follows is mistaken. The reverse is true. A person with a high IQ can usually earn more money than a person with a low IQ can, and that’s the cause of the SES gaps. It’s likewise why you can’t improve the IQ of a retarded person by giving him money.

There are still racial IQ gaps on top of the SES gaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TBC-BW-IQ-SES-withDiff.png

“Socioeconomic status (SES) varies both between and within populations, but Black-White differences in IQ persist among the children of parents matched for SES, and the gap is largest among the children of wealthiest and best educated parents.” —Wikipedia.

You (V for Vendetta) wrote: “Furthermore, many IQ tests are culturally biased towards whites, and, although the use of them has diminished greatly over the years, in poorer school districts they are still widely used…”

That’s more leftist evasion, easily pierced. Here is why the “cultural bias in IQ tests” explanation won’t work.

1. Asian students coming from cultures more different from the American mainstream than Blacks did usually outperform Whites to some extent on IQ tests, and they outperform Blacks greatly.

2. There are tests having no cultural dependence, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which show exactly the same thing that the more common IQ tests do.

You question my philosophical premises? V, I don’t rely on any a-priori premises. YOU do. I rely on empirically acquired statistical evidence, which is precisely what you can’t do, and also maintain your present viewpoint.

You wrote: “Assuming there was a proven genetic difference between races, what would it matter? Is a lower IQ a reason to discriminate against a person or a group? Surely, if one values individual rights, it is immoral to discriminate against anyone on the basis of something such as race. To do so is to value a collectivist mindset, one that views people not as individuals but as groups. Of course, this is America, so it is your right to discriminate as you wish.”

Let me clarify what I mean when I use the word “morality.” I refer, above all, to a will to do what preserves the existence of the group that practices the moral code. The survival of the molecular information (the DNA) that made the cultural information (the moral code) possible, is a prerequisite for every other value judgment and is, therefore, itself the highest value. Why? Because nothing matters to the dead. Because only to something alive may anything else be good. Because neither knowledge, nor freedom, nor justice, nor happiness, nor prosperity can have any importance if nothing living can preserve and appreciate those other values.

An essay by Herschel Elliott makes this concept more clear. Here is a link to “A General Statement of the Tragedy of the Commons,” which provides a close reasoning for why survival is the highest of moral virtues.

http://dieoff.org/page121.htm

So, to answer your questions: Yes, it is appropriate to discriminate when choosing which person shall have opportunity, because opportunity is not automatic success. Rather, it is a challenge which, if mastered, will bring more challenges, which may ultimately lead to success.

Not everyone who might be given opportunity will be able to surmount the challenge that comes with it. For example, a person hired to do a job that demands from him more mental ability than he has will fail to perform that job in a satisfactory way. He’ll either be fired and replaced, or his inability will inflict a never-ending drag on the company’s competitiveness.

Discrimination is a good thing. It’s what makes it possible for you to reject poison and choose nutritious foods when planning your menu. And it is what allows opportunities to be apportioned to people in accordance with their abilities, instead of being wasted on people who can’t make use of them.

I do have copies of both the Bible and Mein Kampf. They are on my bookshelf. However, those books aren’t on that shelf because I endorse the views of their authors. I am not, for example, a Christian. It is simply useful on occasion to have a Bible handy, in case I should want to point out to a Christian that he isn’t behaving in accordance with his own religious teaching.

It does coincidentally happen that I endorse many of Hitler’s opinions, although not necessarily all of them. I judge his views in my own mind in the same way that I judge everyone else’s.

I have read Kapital, too, and have decided that not everything Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels said is stupid. Some of their criticisms of capitalism are correct and well-presented. They made a basic error in holding that social class is the primary division of mankind. It isn’t, because that’s what race is, and the error is why Marxist regimes often fail. Natural evolution created a partial remedy for the tragedy in the commons for biological collectives (it’s called “love”), but it did nothing similar for socio-economic groups. Man is primarily a biological creature, not a financial one.

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@Fred Cooper. I suspect you’re with the Jacky Jones, Billy Moss, Jan Kilpatrick trio, but you raised a point I want to address when you wrote: “I find it amazing that the average age of student at the technical college level is 29.”

In about 1982-3, I went with a girlfriend to her “math class” at Rome Junior College. It turned out to be a remedial math class focused on arithmetic, simple algebra, and the use of a basic handheld calculator. The teacher was holding the class at about an eighth-grade level. All of the students were adults who should have long since learned what was being taught in that class. A few of them were elderly. I almost laughed aloud. It is a good thing that those people were trying to catch up, but the extent to which they had fallen behind is shocking. When you see someone who is 30 years old, you assume that he’s had a courses in calculus and differential equations, and maybe also statistics, Fourier transforms, tensors, and suchlike. It’s amazing to discover that he barely knows algebra.

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@Proud Black Man. Why, now that you mention it, I haven’t been out of the hills of West Virginia for quite a while. My nearest neighbor, Dr. Bob DeMarais, has a Ph.D. in business something-or-other. Our former employer, Dr. William Pierce, had a Ph.D. in physics. It might be that Dr. Pierce just attracted a bunch of extraordinarily skilled people into the Allegheny Mountains. On the other hand, Green Bank Radio Observatory isn’t too far away.

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I’m going to interrupt a troublesome dialogue to go back to what is a very important topic.

George Leef posted above.

Here’s an excellent discussion from today he wrote on what’s wrong with College for All and credential inflation:

http://popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=2415

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Dekalbite,

Of course he’s reading outdated books. He’s using whatever information he can find to justify his preconceived notions of racial superiority. Like any collectivist, he is judging groups based on their traits instead of looking at people individually. Even if his information were true, it still would not justify his collectivist mindset. His only rebuttal to opposing arguments is that they are all liberal propaganda–which I find humorous because I am anything but liberal. I wonder if he’s found a statistical reason to hate gays yet. I’m sure we’ll hear about it.

Great list of books, by the way. If only more people would read them. I would also add:

God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
The End of Faith by Sam Harris
The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
The Language of God by Francis Collins

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And to add to that list of books:

This Kind of War by TR Fehrenbach
Lies My History Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
Cold Black Preach by Robert Decoy

and two great short stories

The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling
To Build a Fire by Jack London

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What ever happened to the quaint concept of pursuing the career which makes one happy; which provides a sense of fullfillment? Yes, we know that, ON AVERAGE, the college grad, over a lifetime, will probably earn a few more denaro (there goes my last sensitivity ribbon) than the non-college grad. Whatever happened to the trade school concept which prepares the kid for a vocation which will provide a sense of accomplishment rather than pad a bank account beyond that required for a nominal lifestyle?

As much as I hate to even suggest this…a college degree, in today’s harsh environment, could conceivably become an anchor to the kid’s career progression. Quite possibly, the constricted economy of the 21st century just may require a whole lot more indians and a whole lot less chiefs. I know this is an arguement which receives a share of attention when it comes time to debate the issue. But at the very same time, kids seem to flock to colleges and universities in ever-expanding numbers. A recent article in USA Today bore this out. The thought process seems to be that by gaining degrees of one flavor or another, job prospects will appear. While this may or may not be the reality du jour, in the end…getting on a payroll…is roughly split down the middle with PREPARATION, schools, degrees, etc accounting for employability prospects, and PLAIN DUMB LUCK/right place-right time accounting for the other half. So the kid might as well pursue that which is enjoyable and fullfilling, rather than go blind for four years studying ideals which may not have the applicability in the work place which they may have once had.

Besides, where is the rule that if one is to pursue a degree, it must be realised by the age of 22?

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