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Are state’s liberals rewarding mediocrity?
Posted By katie allison granju
Rob Huddleston thinks so:
I suppose that it makes sense that a General Assembly comprised of mostly mediocre legislators would seek to reward Tennessee’s mediocre college students.
I also suppose that there is some degree of liberal thought at work here, as over 2,000 State employees with degrees in hand are laid off while students who partied too hard to keep a pathetic “B-” GPA are rewarded. Liberals have always had that urge to push as many people to the middle of the “bell curve” as possible and then provide economic incentives to keep them there, all the while stifling the achievements of the top end of that curve - especially when it comes to public education issues.
May 19th, 2008
BS BS BS BS—and I don’t mean the degree. i don’t think liberals had anything to do with this. It was whining parents with spoiled and undisciplined kids in college.
I don’t know what it is about college, but there is some sort of voodoo there. A kid makes great grades in high school and falls flat on his keester after just one quarter of college—and leaves forever for a life of—well—digging ditches. I observed this my first couple of years in college and watched it closely. Here are some observations from those days:
1) Some kids were at college solely because mom and dad wanted them there when the kids desperately wanted to be anywhere else.
2) Some kids were there and desperately wanted to do well in school but could not—even when they tried. These were kids who did pretty well in high school, but they could not handle the college academics. This always seemed strange to me because much of the work was actually easier in college than in high school and the grading system was 90+ for an A when the more rigorous 95+ for an A was the high school standard.
3) Some kids were let down by their teachers in high school such that they had no chance in college. My good friend Jimmy came to college from a small town in Robertson County. Almost in tears one night, he told me how his high school had been unable to recruit a chemistry teacher, so they had to put an unqualified person in the position. This person basically gave a shrug because they didn’t know much about chemistry, and chemistry class turned into a study hall, presumably giving a pass in chemistry to the kids just for showing up. Jimmy was lost in his college science classes, crawled into a bottle, and dropped out. I never heard from him again, but he was a nice guy.
4) Many kids did party. In my freshman year at Austin Peay State University, I lived in Ellington Hall. You could enter by the door on one end and breathe marijuana smoke the whole way as you walked through the hall to the other end of the building. That was on weekdays when classes were in session. There were an awful lot of C averages in that place.
5) Then there was casino night in the dorm at another college. It always seemed to be sponsored and attended by business majors. It happened mostly on Saturday nights, but also happened sometimes on a weeknight. There was plenty of gambling and plenty of booze that lasted all night long—and everyone got excrement-faced drunk. I never attended one but knew the guys who did. It always seemed to me that casino night dawned on the scene when the protagonists had a D- in accounting, final exams were coming up, and the guys needed an escape because they “…just couldn’t face it.” That’s a quote. Best I could tell, they got their business degrees barely by the skins of their teeth. To this day, I have a very low opinion of business majors because of these guys. I would bet my last nickel that these folks make up a very big part of the clamor for lottery scholarships for people with a GPA below 3.00—and we wonder how the subprime mortgage crisis could have happened.
6) Then there were the rich ones. I think they were in college because their parents wanted them to be there, but the kid knew they really did not need to be there because their trust fund already had them in high clover for the rest of their natural lives. I never could get a good handle on what kind of grades these kids made. However, I dearly remember the girl from Memphis. Her “diddy” gave her expense presents, which she immediately sold on the sly to get extra spending money (never could figure that one out). Her “diddy” would send one of his company’s trucks anytime she wanted to move to a better domocile. Whatever she needed, whatever she wanted, “diddy” would provide. If she never had to work for anything in her life, I always wondered whether she was working for a good grade in a class.
I could go on with the list. My point is simply that the spectrum of reasons why people do poorly in college is very broad. The primary problem is a lack of discipline—taming of self if you will. It has nothing to do with liberalism. Many of you would classify me as a liberal, but I pretty much agree that lowering the lottery scholarship standard below a 3.00 GPA was a bad idea.