Dual Credit Courses: Can Numbers People Guarantee Quality?

It seems simple enough.  Students in high school take introductory courses at nearby state colleges for dual credit.  But what is the dividing line between high school and college these days?  Should we really rely on assumptions in place from academic ages past?  The whole discussion today is cast in terms of quantity, with little if any attention to quality, though the latter makes all the difference in the world.

     Numbers people realize that the public will quickly surrender critical judgment when it comes to statistics, which they haven’t been trained to understand.  Even so, some state education bureaucrats seem to sense that the public needs a more straightforward, clearheaded explanation of some numbers-driven models: “The model was executed with ordinary least squares regression using White’s heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix correction (HC3 ) for robust standard error estimates. The two predictors (dual enrollment participation and ACT composite score) were regressed on a power-transformed iteration of GPA.”

      Impressive gobbledygook at best, meant to cow taxpayers into charismatic acceptance of social engineering shrouded in jargon.  Too bad that the shallow understanding of most politicians can’t rise to the occasion in order to offer “let me explain” decodings to constituents.

     As it turns out, however, high school and many colleges courses are indistinguishable, with rigorous-and-demanding standards missing from both.  Assumptions from earlier academic generations no longer hold.  Why?  Government fiscal “experts” simply can’t justify what they’re doing on the basis of quality.  If students are dumber than ever, no one will know.