Colleges Dumbing Down For Texans

Here's an interesting article titled, "Ben Franklin, first president of the U.S.?" from the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, detailing some of the shameful ignorance displayed by college graduates from our state.

While this problem is not really anything new to the country, one might expect that states would take the initiative to rectify the situation (or at least we would hope so). Texas, I fear, is going out of it's way to do just the opposite in this case. Enter Texas House bill #588.

I've never been a particular fan of the infamous 10% state rule that we adhere to, and reading an article like this only makes me 90% more disappointed in/at that system. The problem is simple: we've stopped making students more intelligent, but rather have employed a system that simply sets the bar much lower. As we continue down this path, it should not be long before we just lay the bar on the ground. ...if you can spell your first name, you're granted a diploma.

To anyone NOT familiar with our system [Texas House Bill #588], the 10% rule simply states that anyone who graduates within the top 10% of their graduating high school class is automatically eligible for (and granted) entrance to a state-funded university or college. As far as I understand, the system was designed to help balance the socio-economic disparity that has long since plagued the Texas education system (arguably this automatically makes race a determining factor as well).

Unfortunately for the state of Texas, and in this case George Washington too, its primary flaw is obvious.

Consider two scenarios: (a) a graduating class of 500 people where the average class GPA is a 3.3 and the average SAT score is a 1050 and (b) a graduating class of 500 people where the average class GPA is a 2.5 and the average SAT score is an 850.

Under our law, and all other things being equal, BOTH schools are guaranteed to have 50 people from each class admitted into a state-funded university. This fact remains even though the math would clearly show that student #51 from (a) is a much more suitable candidate than a fair portion (if not all) of the top 50 from (b). Granted, this simplistic argument does NOT take into account WHY class (b) has the scores that they do. Is it likely that 500 students are just less capable than 500 others? Probably not - which gets into other determining factors I won't discuss here.

But going back to the original topic at hand, the question I'd like to pose is: At what point of ignorance do we have to stop and analyze the education we are 'handing out' in this state? Is it NOT sufficient enough that Ben Franklin was the first president of the United States?

Given our especially low scholastic expectations and exceedingly high levels of state pride, my guess is students won't be ridiculed until they start calling it '5 flags over Texas' - and even still, the ridicule will simply come from not knowing the name of an amusement park, never mind the history therein.