Writing Students Off

“Some seeds are meant to spawn taller plants. That is the way of things.” -- Fredrik deBoer

Most of us who came up through the reverse funnel of competitive admissions internalized some version of what Fredrik deBoer wrote about in The Chronicle this week. It’s the idea that some people have academic talent and some just don’t, and that beyond a certain point, pouring resources into helping those that don’t is simply throwing money down a rat hole. At each stage of the tracking and winnowing process, the story goes, perspicacious institutions rightly separate the wheat from the chaff, the better to spend precious resources on those who are most able to thrive. As for the rest, well, they’ll do what they’ll do.

It’s a frustrating argument because it’s closed. How do you know who has what it takes? They succeed. Why don’t some students succeed? Because they don’t have what it takes. Easy!

Like all closed arguments, it’s true in a vacuum, which is why it’s usually presented that way. But as soon as you let reality in, the whole thing collapses.

From deBoer’s brief piece, for instance, one would not know that race is a powerful predictor of degree completion. Does that mean that some races have more of what it takes than others? I assume deBoer would recoil from that conclusion, as any decent person would, yet it flows from his premises as soon as you apply his premises to the real world. That should be a red flag, at the very least.

Oddly, for someone who mentions a background in educational research, deBoer uncritically accepts the accuracy of judgments rendered in “weedout” courses. He even goes so far as to call them “act[s] of mercy.” Aside from the callousness of it, the argument is factually weak. In the community college world, for instance, we’ve discovered that placing too much faith in the Accuplacer is a fool’s errand; students whose test scores suggest hopelessness often do quite well when placed in corequisite classes. If student ability is given and immutable, how is it that students who flunk out of their first college often turn it around at their second? For that matter, how is it that students who graduate from community colleges and then transfer actually outperform their counterparts who started at four-year colleges? Any reverse funnel worth its salt wouldn’t make such egregious errors year after year. Yet, here we are.

Lest I be accused of building a straw man, I’ll acknowledge up front that different people have different tastes and talents. At this point, I’d put realizing my childhood dream of playing major league baseball at the same level of plausibility as, say, levitation. That’s obvious. So if we concede that differences of taste and talent exist, what to do?

Step one: epistemological humility. DeBoer’s “act of mercy” relies on an almost Calvinist demarcation into the elect and the damned; once you’ve revealed that you’re among the damned, it’s all over for you. The judgments of the academic elite are apparently not to be questioned. But, to use a social science term, that’s crap. Ability is neither fixed nor easily ascertained from the outside. It takes many different forms, and it varies over time and place. The point of public higher education, and especially of open-admissions institutions, is to give people the chance to show (or discover) what works for them. Sometimes that’s obvious from the start; sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error. Good teachers know that; we’ve all seen the proverbial lightbulb go on over a student’s head when something that seemed hopelessly opaque suddenly clicks. If a student who struggles for a long time suddenly gets it, which part of the journey reflected their true underlying nature? It’s a hard question to answer because it’s the wrong question.

I agree with deBoer that college should not be the only plausible route to a decent living. But that’s not fundamentally about colleges; that’s about the economy. As a decent human being, I’d much rather see an economy in which all sorts of people could afford to live economically secure lives in decent homes without fear of medical bankruptcy. But that’s a political question, not an educational one.

Yes, we’ve all seen students who got it right away, and others who never did. Nobody denies that. But going from “that didn’t work” to “that can’t work” is unwarranted and inaccurate, and it aligns with some pretty horrible history.

Egalitarianism doesn’t mean pretending everyone is identical. It means not writing anyone off. I’m proud to have spent the last 17 years of my career at institutions that take anyone who shows up and gives them a chance, whether it’s a first chance, a second chance or a last chance. I do my damnedest to make sure that we have what it takes to help them figure out what their contribution will be. If that’s debasing the currency, then we need a new economy.