The College Fix

Untold millions in wasted educational dollars will not make up for Americans’ lack of diligence and good parenting. Heather Mac Donald writes for National Review Online:

As President Obama promotes his plan to offer universal pre-school, an account of a poor Chinese family’s drive to send their daughter to college offers a contrast to the American education and poverty industries.

Nineteen-year-old college sophomore Wu Caoying has been tirelessly overseen by her fanatically-hard-working parents. Though uneducated, they fiercely monitored her study habits. When her village grammar school lost its English teacher, thus interrupting her study of that crucial language, they scrimped further to put together the money to hire an English tutor. Wu Caoying’s schools were not filled with government-funded dropout-prevention specialists, gang-intervention workers, and other costly paraprofessionals to try to persuade students to study. Rather, the deal was: The school provides the teachers, the students do the work.

Once in college, Wu Caoying also did not encounter a massive bureaucracy dedicated to persuading “first-generation college students” to stay in college. The deal was: The college provides the professors, the students do the work. “Studying is almost all that Ms. Wu does,” reports the New York Times. “She says she still has no boyfriend: ‘I have friends who have boyfriends and they argue all the time. It is such a hassle.’” It is a good bet that Ms. Wu’s polytechnic also does not provide a “Rape Crisis Center” teeming with feminist counselors to ease co-eds through the devastation of post-drunken-hook-up regrets.

The American education system looks shamefully decadent by comparison…

Read the full article here.

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