US Educational Achievement Drops As Diversity Grows

The New York Times takes a look at falling educational achievement in the US. Once the world leader in percentage of 25 to 34 year olds with college degrees, the US now ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

“The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation’s long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis,” Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. “To improve our college completion rates, we must think ‘P-16’ and improve education from preschool through higher education.”

...Canada now leads the world in educational attainment, with about 56 percent of its young adults having earned at least associate’s degrees in 2007, compared with only 40 percent of those in the United States. (The United States’ rate has since risen slightly.)

While almost 70 percent of high school graduates in the United States enroll in college within two years of graduating, only about 57 percent of students who enroll in a bachelor’s degree program graduate within six years, and fewer than 25 percent of students who begin at a community college graduate with an associate’s degree within three years.

The problem is even worse for low-income students and minorities: only 30 percent of African-Americans ages 25-34, and less than 20 percent of Latinos in that age group, have an associate’s degree or higher. And students from the highest income families are almost eight times as likely as those from the lowest income families to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24. _ImpactLab_quoting_NYT

SourceIn order to make the best use of a rigorous 4 year college degree program, a person's IQ should be close to 115 or above -- or 1 standard deviation above the mean IQ of most European and North American countries. But mean IQs of many immigrant groups to the US are substantially lower than the current mean IQ for the US. And it is from these lower-IQ immigrant groups where most of the nation's future young people will arise. In other words, the college-age population of the US is becoming increasingly "diverse," in the sense that a larger proportion of this group will lack the requisite IQ needed to succeed in a rigorous 4 year college program.

In an attempt at greater diversity and enrollment, prestigious universities are seeking to recruit a larger number of students from many low-IQ groups, with predictable results. Fewer of these students are completing college programs -- even when given extra years to finish.

Competition to admit and enroll the "smart fraction" of these generally low-IQ groups is intense among prestigious schools, but even among such smart fractions of low achieving groups, successful completion of degree programs is lower than among students of European or Asian descent.

The NYT article above is a prime example of modern journalism and academia intentionally "looking past" the pertinent questions in order to ask a score of trite and irrelevant ones. If society wants to improve itself educationally and economically, it will need to improve the quality of its human resources.

But in order to do that, it would have to admit that there was a problem with current immigration policies. That is the last thing which the political activist advisors to the current ruling class intend to do.