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How do we get more students from disadvantaged backgrounds into university?
It’s a complex issue, but some of the answers are remarkably simple. Indeed, simplification is the answer – at least when it comes to smoothing the path from secondary to tertiary education.
In a report for Brookings, Susan M Dynarski explains how some parts of the United States have made a big difference at little cost:
“These seemingly minor obstacles put many low-income students off the path to college. A study of high school seniors in Boston found that few low-income youth “decide” against college. Rather, they miss a key deadline, or incorrectly fill out a form, or fail to take a required class, and thereby fall off the path to college.”
Bureaucracy isn’t much fun for any of us, but for students who lack sufficient resources, encouragement and guidance, it can be the final straw:
“Consider the ACT and SAT. These entrance exams are required for admission to virtually all selective colleges in the US. Students have to register and pay for these tests, and then travel to a testing center on a weekend to take them. This is straightforward, if you have internet access, a computer, a credit card, and a car. If you are missing any of these resources, it’s a lot more challenging.”
Fortunately, in some areas, an effort has been made to remove these obstacles:
“…in a dozen states, the ACT or SAT is now given in school, for free, on a school day during school hours. In most cases, the ACT or SAT replaces the standardized test that students would otherwise take in high school, so there is no additional time spent testing… Sitting for the test is also required, which means that students can’t opt out because of low expectations – whether theirs or those of the adults around them.”
How much of a difference does this make? Dynarski cites the example of Michigan, which reformed its testing system in 2007:
“For every 1,000 students who scored high enough to attend a selective college before testing was universal, another 230 high scorers were revealed by the new policy. Among low-income students, the effect was even more dramatic: for every 1,000 low-income students who had taken the test before 2007 and scored well, another 480 college-ready, low-income students were uncovered by the universal test.”
Of course, identifying students who ought to go to college doesn’t guarantee that they will. But, at the very least, universal testing of aptitude leaves educators and policymakers with no excuse when disadvantaged, but talented, students fail to progress.
And there’s a wider lesson, one that applies to regulatory reform in all policy areas: it’s not having rules that’s the problem, but the time and hassle it takes to follow them.
For instance, universal testing of students is a rule and pretty strict one – but that’s fine as long as sitting the test (if not the test itself) is made easy.
As long as we understand the distinction between rules and red tape, we can maintain standards without imposing bureaucratic burdens on those most likely to stumble.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeNostalgia is a wonderful thing.
Welcome reflections. However strong the current, we still choose, in some essential measure, whether to resist or succumb to the electrical pull. Many of us have such digitized habits that some kind of major disruption is needed to even wake us up to this choice. Me included, on most days.
I’m interested to see how Mr. Kingsnorth’s newfound Christian faith interacts or collides with his defense of the natural world. I doubt he will adopt anything a like a primarily otherworldly or abstract focus. I hope not.
Lovely essay. Although, I wonder what relationship this worldly and noisy electricity bears towards the electricity coursing through our own nerves and brain. Even that animates that part of us which contemplates.
What relationship does the metal that cures people of tumours, have with the metal that tears people apart in warfare ?
“You can aim towards God, I think now, or you can keep the doors closed. You can let the electrical current pull you down into the world…Once the rooms begin to be cleared out, though, the silence comes.”
You can aim towards God, and I’ve tried it, but I’ve found it’s only possible in a kind of vague, deistic sense. God doesn’t seem to intervene in the world in any predictable way. Prayer doesn’t seem to produce any obvious effects in the material world. You pray and you get no response – just silence. Sometimes a nice coincidence makes you warm and fuzzy because you associate it with your feelings about God but it’s transitory. There’s no real change to the external, physical, world to speak of. You’re chasing a phantasm, contextualizing quotidian events to mean something they can’t seem to mean.
Centuries of textual criticism has made it really impossible for a serious person to take the Bible literally. And, even if you take the Bible literally, there are verses like Matthew 16:28, among others, which stress the imminent return of the Son of Man which, two thousand years later, still hasn’t happened. We’d know if it happened, too; Paul stresses that this was definitely going to be a very public event. So, it seems to me the inescapable conclusion is that Jesus was not divine. He was a man who made predictions that didn’t come true and then his followers embellished stories about him that imbued his life with a purpose he never intended nor could have ever imagined.
Now, it’s possible to rationalize all of this – and rationalization is what modern Christian apologetics is – to make it so Jesus was never wrong about anything, explain away contradictions and embarrassing passages to preserve faith. If you’re a serious person who wants to know what the truth likely is, however, this isn’t going to cut it. So, let’s say you’re a person like me. You think the most likely explanation for why things exist is a transcendent creative consciousness – God, if you’d like. But Jesus pretty clearly wasn’t this consciousness or the son of this consciousness, whatever that would mean. Even the idea that this consciousness is a personality that a human being can have a relationship with is kind of silly. I do admit I find it hard to know how to approach this God I think exists without the framework offered by Christianity. I can’t believe it and I feel that other religious traditions are foreign to me and forever beyond my reach in a practical sense. However, the kind of mysticism that Kingsnorth offers doesn’t do the trick either. The silence coming when the electricity goes out doesn’t seem like evidence that we’ve been pulled away from divine participation in the world and the silence is the return of that participation. The silence implies something else I doubt Kingsnorth would like to admit.
That’s a great comment.
I don’t think there is a creator, a “transcendent creative consciousness”, but i can admire the way you’re thinking about being alive and conscious.
Thanks. Where the universe came from, where life came from, what consciousness is, we don’t know. We may never know. I think it’s alright to guess considering we’ll likely never know the answers to these questions in our lifetimes. What I think we can’t do is discard rationality because we know it’s not going to take us across the finish line. You have to stick to it as far as it can take you. Kingsnorth likes to romanticize pre-scientific life but I think he’s not seriously considering what life was like when it was ruled by the whims of superstition. What it was like when disease and earthquake and storm were seen as punishments for sin and there were moral panics about things like witchcraft. We’ve certainly lost something through scientific materialism but I don’t think he’s right when he describes things like electricity as us wielding powers we’re unprepared to wield. Who, or what, would have prepared us for it? Kingsnorth’s ending sounds more like nihilism than religious exaltation. If the only thing we have when the world we’ve built shuts down is silence, I’m not sure that’s better.
I agree with much of that.
What comes across to me in his writing is a sense of loss. It results in some lovely-sounding prose but that seems to reflect his effort to regain something rather than being illuminating.
I’m not sure he’ll find what he’s looking for (a bit like Bono!) but as i’ve suggested, the search starts and ends within us.
I agree with you. I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to be Kingsnorth. Can you imagine being the type of person that, whenever a transformer blows, immediately thinks about the spirits that are no longer propitiated by humans because the refrigerator was invented and food poisoning is no longer a constant threat? Everybody experiences anemoia, a feeling of longing for a time we never lived in, when we see old houses or churches. We imagine the people that inhabited these buildings lived in simpler, better times than ours where peace was possible. But the people living in those times were beset by frightening changes too. The mature thing to do is to accept that every human being longs for a golden age that never existed. And you’re right to say that the search begins and ends within us. If any human being has ever experienced peace, it wasn’t because the world around him was any less threatening and incomprehensible, or life any less ephemeral, than we find it now.
The Future is religious.
Science-worship and Modernity are the Wave of the Past.
In which case, the search is a road to nowhere.
For many people, the search ends up within God.
“We don’t know.” Actually, we do – but the enemies of Christianity don’t want to know.
The only certain thing is that the Modernity you admire is on its last legs.
And if Christ doesn’t conquer, Mohammed will.
I’m not going to dignify your first sentence with a response.
As for your second one, reports of the death of science-based modernity have been greatly exaggerated. The churches are still empty. We are products of “Enlightenment” ideas and, no matter how we may dislike the outcome of those ideas brought to their logical conclusion in the form of scientific materialism, we still live in a world where information is too easily available to allow for genuine faith in Christianity to return at scale. The moment the Vulgate Bible was printed by Gutenberg in 1455, it was the beginning of the end. People could read what it said for themselves and the Bible cannot stand up to scrutiny as a reliable historical document, never mind the inerrant word of the creator of the universe.
For your third point, your concern that Islam is going to conquer if Christianity doesn’t return to its former eminence in the West is a reasonable one. Unfortunately, faith doesn’t work that way. Nobody is going to be willing to die for a Christianity they hope will act as a political counterpoint to Islam but they have doubts about. I see no evidence that genuine belief in Christianity is meaningfully increasing in Western countries and it’s definitely not at the point where Islam is today where young men are willing to martyr themselves for it. As frightening as Islam is, I think you’re overrating the risk it poses because you think of things in religious terms. If Christianity is done, then some other aggressive world religion will take it’s place. Well, something else has taken Christianity’s place in the West which isn’t Islam never will be. That thing is more powerful than Islam and it’s more likely to destroy us.
Reading the Bible made people fanatical Protestants. It didn’t make them opponents of the Bible – something that rarely happened before about 1680; that is (not coincidentally) when Europe became master of the world and growingly affluent.
Now Western power and wealth are slipping away quite rapidly. Scientific modernity will disappear from the West soon after. China is too tyrannical, and too politically insecure, to be a guardian for it.
Christianity is a growing religion even in the West. London is becoming a more religious city. It’s secular Westerners, not Christianity, who are dying out. The secular West will of course die with them. Contraception has destroyed the secular West.
No new religion will arise. But in many parts of the world, Christians are being persecuted and killed by Islamists. Those martyrs don’t share your lamentably blinkered and outdated view of the Bible.
I can’t tell the future, my friend, but something tells me Christianity isn’t making the kind of comeback you think it is. My view of the Bible isn’t “blinkered and outdated” as you say. There are people today, like Jordan Peterson, making a lot of money off of talking about the Bible in vague ways that avoid the thorny issue of its historicity. And that’s the problem for me. I don’t care about the narrative underpinnings of Western culture or a force capable of protecting us from Islam. I want to know if what the Bible claims literally happened. That’s obviously the way the writers of the books of the Bible wanted us to read them. They openly say that they want to tell us what literally happened so that we may believe. To me, that forecloses a symbolic reading of the Gospels.
Biblical scholars have credibly shown that Jesus’s original message was that the Son of Man, a cosmic judge foretold in Daniel, would return immanently in Jesus’s time to bring about a new heavenly kingdom on Earth. Jesus’s ministry was to make way for the Son of Man by warning Jews to repent before it was too late. Jesus also seems to have thought he was going to be the king of this new realm, which makes it unlikely he knew he was going to be executed upon his arrival in Jerusalem. Significantly, Jesus never says he’s the Son of man – later writers such as whoever wrote the Gospel of John begin saying that nearly a century after Jesus’s death. Jesus also never says that his death is a necessary sacrifice to purchase a reprieve for mankind’s sin with God. Remember, Jesus almost certainly didn’t go to Jerusalem with the goal of being crucified so he couldn’t have known that was going to be the outcome. It’s very difficult to synthesize what seem to be Jesus’s actual statements (he would be the king in the kingdom the Son of Man would usher in) with later Christian belief (Jesus’s real mission was that he had to be crucified to buy a reprieve for mankind’s sins). Finally, Jesus says several times, and Paul clearly believed, that the kingdom of the Son of Man would come before the deaths of the people he was addressing in Matthew. That hasn’t happened. Now, you can rationalize these points away all you’d like, but if Biblical scholars, who’ve dedicated their lives to the study of these books and many of whom can read the manuscripts in the original Aramaic and Greek, are wrong about this, then who’s right? You?
Christianity doesn’t need to make a comeback, it never went away. The only people who think it’s dead are those who only see the world in a western view. That’s a rather out of date idea.
We trade arguments all day, but there are now more Christians in a couple of countries in Africa thna the whole of Europe & THE US put together
Interestingly although its not a race, Christ is well in the lead
If you don’t want to believe in God, as revealed in Jesus Christ, He won’t force you to. So you get silence.
If you want an answer, believe – take the gamble of having Faith.
The absence of a reply from God is an argument against yourself, not against Christianity.
Jesus said He had no idea when His second coming would be.
As for textual critics supposedly having destroyed the credibility of the Bible – only people who hate the Bible anyway, or extremely credulous people, believe that.
“So do our solar panels, which switch off when the grid does”. I think a lot of people who have shelled out for solar panels snd batteries don’t realise that they don’t have an off-grid system. The batteries save money, they sre not backup. A true off-grid system is rather more expensive.
There’s really no good reason for this, just crap design! A few quid for an inverter would provide the mains power from the batteries to run whatever electronics is needed… and presumably these solar panel batteries have an inverter already!
Beautiful writing. Silence is one of the most breathtaking experiences—it’s like the moment before we are born.
But alas, here we are, all plugged into the electrical grid!
Thank you for stepping out of your silent retreat to whisper into our eyes.
“a world that, once the switches came, could never come back again”
Don’t be too sure. That is where Labour and Ed Millipede are determine to take us.
Wonderful article, beautifully written, one of the benefits of space and silence.
I just finished reading the new print of Robert Byron’s (not that one) The Station. Mount Athos was a little different then (1920’s), but only a little.
Really nice article. Thank you.
There is another kind of silence that it would take generations of electricity deprivation to recover. Before the age of electricity-powered media, most people knew relatively little of the world beyond their direct experience but, what they did know, they knew more intimately. With the advent of radio and television this started to change. People began to pick up a mass-mediated bag of abstracted ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinions’ about the wider world…..great for those souls brimful of curiosity about things and toxic for those (the majority I think) who are too-easily morally and intellectually biddable. Now in the digital age the gigantic supply information/disinformation coming at each of us greatly exceeds both the demand for it and one’s ability to properly process it. Another kind of noise… (one that I discussed in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias)
I often fantasise about a world deprived of electricity. In my fantasy, there’s me in my own little House on the Prairie….making do, using my ingenuity to repair things, singing songs and telling tales to the children in the evening. Living a good, hard, stoical life. The fantasy unravels when some feral gang notices how well me and my family are coping….so come by to loot our little home nest and to murder us.
When I was little I speculated that there were little men living in the valve at the back of the television/radio
Perhaps the author is talking about deep silence.
Oh, i’m sure he is – although i think the term “profound” is more expressive.
The thing is… one can’t “go searching” for it (as per my earlier point). If you’re ready for it, it may find you.
I always appreciate your unconventional takes, but Paul Kingsnorth is offering us a profundity of greater depth than your anti-institutional bent. There exists a truth just over the horizon of the natural world.
The gravitational field is as natural as the electromagnetic field. Perhaps we should dispense with the former and float off up to heaven.
In his diaries, the clergyman Francis Kilvert described a world without electricity.
The silences he describes in the countryside cannot be replicated now, even if the grid fails.
Those silences carried voices. He hears a child being scolded by its mother from across the valley. One New Year’s morning he hears the bells of churches from a town 20 miles away.
Then there is the rawness of the world. One Winter’s morning he bathes in a tin bath after breaking the ice that covered the water.
This was a lovely article, by a lovely writer. My most sincere thanks to you!
(By the way, every Sabbath and Holiday, religious Jews turn off every electronic device [lights are on timers] and silence comes. No phones, no computers, no cars, no noise. No doing, no making, no moving, no changing. Just living, just being, just talking, just thinking.)
Electricity is a natural force. It can be generated and distributed, but it’s also part of our own being, within us all and as essential to life as blood, or water.
I don’t agree with the dichotomies this author sets up; for instance, between electricity and prayer. I revel in silence, but don’t need to pray to induce it and it’s possible to be silent within whilst the world rampages around us.
I can see what he’s trying to get at, but somehow it seems as if he’s forcing it. He feels the need to go on pilgrimage (to Greece) to find something – “change” – when all the time, as before, it lies within us; within the stillness of our own spirit, if we allow it to just be.
5 feet away from his house the wifi won’t work.
The answer, as before, lies within.
(Closer to his router.)
Actual spit-take. Well played, sir.
Excellent comment. I was going to write something similar but you expressed these ideas better than I could.
I should add I greatly enjoy Paul Kingsnorth’s writing. He reminds us to be aware, and think about, the types of issues he describes in this essay. And he writes beautifully.
As for me, I’m privileged. I live in a place where I can walk out my front door and, over the course of ten miles or so, stroll beneath huge conifers then move onto the beach. I often like to walk early, before the busy, human part of life has begun, and stand by the ocean, eyes closed, and listen to the waves. It is a self-conscious retreat from civilization.Then I return home, have a hot shower, a hot breakfast, and switch on the internet.
Sometimes I struggle to square that circle, to reconcile the semi-mystical with the technological, but I recognize I’m engaging in different aspects of the same reality and it’s not readily apparent which aspect is the more profound.
Thanks JB.
I find the same peace on the Pennine moors which surround me, with its ancient pathways and signs of human habitation from long ago, now slowly returning to wilderness.
I have to deal with the taiga. As long as you don’t get eaten by beers or wolves a sense of isolation may be found.
A beer is a dangerous thing; many beers, more so.
More dangerous than bears. They are attracted to them like honey.
Funny!
Sounds beautiful.
Ten miles!
Well said. We take ourselves with us wherever we go.