The state of education in the United States

I just heard this from a professor I know:

I was down talking with one of our faculty that teaches Math for Elementary Teachers; it's getting scary---many of these kids can't do the skills they are going to be teaching.

My son can explain why the standard algorithm works for, say, multiplication of multiple-digit numbers. These kids can't do the skill reliably, much less explain why it works.

The kicker is that we're trying to teach these pre-adults the models that I used to show my son why multiplication works the way it does---and they still can't do it reliably.

We're letting in kids that have no business getting a university degree and saddling them with lots of debt that they will not be able to discharge. Many of them don't really want to be here in the first place, but this is what they've been told they have to do, and they can't think of anything else.

So, they're just continuing the tricks that got them through public school (without learning anything, I might add...).

And there are rumors that universities are going to be funded based on completion rates. High schools are already being assessed on the percentage of their graduates that go on to universities, so they're incentivized to get their students to come. Banks and such are incentivized to give the students loans. And we're about to be incentivized to give them a diploma. This, kids, is how bubbles are made.

You know how there were those guys that saw what was happening in the sub-prime mortgage market and bet against it? Bet against student loans.

This person is not prone to making dire prognostications. But I was chilled when I read that last sentence: "Bet against student loans."

I've read Michael Lewis's excellent book, The Big Short about the 2008 sub-prime mortgage bubble. I highly recommend reading that book if you haven't. It describes (in plain language with entertaining accounts of the people involved) how incentivizing banks to loan money to people for houses they couldn't afford was the thing that was at the heart of getting that crisis rolling. "Bet against student loans" brought that whole mess back to mind instantly.

If we produce a generation of students who cannot find the employment they need to pay back their loans, it will be much more than just a financial crisis (as of 2014, total student loan debt in the US was at $1.2 trillion). It will be a crisis of the collapse of the fundamental infrastructure of any society: its people.

In a species such as humans which cannot pass on biologically much of what our children need to survive, nothing is more important to a civilization's long-term survivability than education. We need highly educated people to keep our society running and pushing forward.

I don't know what the solutions are to this problem. But I say that it is one of the largest problems facing us today, along with global warming and rising income inequality.