[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donald Burrill) wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> Ah. Now, that's the classical question allegedly addressed by > statistics, isn't it? So: take a sample, ... > Viewing the undergraduate students with whom I have had contact in the > past several years, at two colleges and a university, as a sample, I > would certainly be tempted to infer that the output of the population of > "thousands and thousands of high schools" across the country is (on the > average) indeed inferior to the output of the high schools across the > country half a century ago. > OTOH, possibly the two "outputs" are not comparable: construed as > "those admitted to college/university", one suspects that the current > population is much less selected-for-excellence, on the whole, than the > population in the 1950s; except, as mentioned by some contributors to > this thread, in the "elite" universities. In fact, it was only about 50 years ago that the high school graduation rate reached 50%, so there was a lot more selection going on back then. Of course, not all that selection was specifically for academic ability; you had students who couldn't afford to finish their secondary education because they had to work full-time to support their families of origin, among other things. And there were lots of well-paying, long-term jobs out there that didn't require much in the way of education. At the same time, admissions criteria have changed, becoming at least apparently more objective. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
