In 2014, the Gallup-Purdue Index polled 30,000 adults with Bachelor’s Degrees. They asked these graduates about what they termed “support” and “experiential” factors, each relevant to what the student experienced at college. These factors were referred to as the “Big Six,” as they connected to how graduates believed their collegiate experiences prepared them for life.

The questions and responses are summarized in the following table:

These responses collectively demonstrate a disappointingly low level of agreement that important support and experiential factors are present at college. The data should be interpreted as another call to rework higher education to better serve its constituency.

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An interesting question!

It was posed by a highly intelligent woman, married but without children, who has a good job that does not overlap with any aspect of the educational system. The query was in response to a conversational observation by myself that America ranks in the 20’s worldwide when it comes to academic excellence.

Okay, here are some possible reasons:

*Americans are implicitly (mostly) arrogant, believing without the necessity for thought that the USA is number one in everything. After all, “we are the best country, right!” Ignorance is an inevitable partner of such an attitude.

*White America has nothing to gain—in terms of money or power—from a better-educated non-white population. An exception is made for those ultra-smart Asians (to some, conceptually thought of as being “white” because of their attitudinal and aspirational overlap) who are crucial to the engineering know-how behind many of the iDevices and social media technical innovations without which we apparently believe we simply could not function.

*The complete acceptance of single motherhood as simply a lifestyle decision is highly correlated with poorly paid, energy-depleted women who are often so exhausted by making ends meet that they are challenged to be there for their children in a way that is relevant to education.

*Relative newcomers to the country have misunderstood our non-national education system and have been less questioning of matters educational than would be true otherwise.

*In much of urban America, it is difficult to confront defensive teachers unions about the necessity for evaluation without appearing vindictive toward labor and minorities. And usually it is equally difficult for minority leaders to go public with productive criticism of their counterparts within the system.

*Taxpayers in affluent geographic areas who have indirectly sent substantial monies to financially challenged sectors of their states have become convinced that much of it has been for naught and doing more is simply a waste.

*The realization that economic mobility is not what it used to be is somewhat discouraging to those who might invest time, energy, and funds in education reform. If the pump cannot be primed in such fashion, why exert on the handle. Better to attack underlying conditions, particularly poverty.

*In the slightly modified words of the iconoclastic educator John Taylor Gatto, the education system actually does a good job once it is realized that the true metric for analyzing outcomes is whether the training of young people to become consumers, and nothing more, has been successful. Note that the big push regarding the growing Hispanic population is how white businesses can better market to them, not how their educational attainment can be lifted. The latter is being accomplished on their own.

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“A Public Service Video for the Techno Generation”

**

Every person boarding the morning commuter bus has his or her earplugs firmly affixed, eyes intently focused on the iDevice in their hands.

Arriving at their financial employer, attention immediately shifts to the multiple multi-colored computer screens surrounding the cavernous room in which millions, perhaps billions, of dollars will be invested, transferred, and/or received with a single computer click, and nary a spoken word is necessary.

At other company offices, it may be information and not necessarily money which flies from one computer to another, each sender quietly ensconced in their constricted corporate cubicle.

Some of the above commuters are students. When in class, their professor silently puts his power point presentation up on the whiteboard. Without discussion, notes are taken by the students, in preparation for the on-line quiz which will follow the last slide.

In each of these cases, lunch is ordered by simply punching some buttons on the iDevice that everyone has at their disposal. To be without such a device is to be ostracized, to be like the fish on the dock, flopping wildly in a world which is no longer home.

For each of the commuters, the day passes wordlessly.

On returning home, he or she checks his or her home tablet, which has programmed the meal now circling in the microwave. A significant other is on their own tablet, while the child born of sudden, soundless sex is mesmerized by the cartoon on his Disney iDevice. When the child has a question, his parents press buttons on their iDevices and their thoughts are projected onto the nearest whiteboard-sized wall. The dog of the house slowly circles the living room, bewildered by his inability to make sense out of the headphones placed on his ears.

A series of pings indicates the various times when each member of the family is expected to wash, brush, and prepare for bed. A good night message automatically appears on the iDevice permanently attached to the night table in every bedroom.

**

As the credits roll at the end, the complete silence is broken: “thank you for watching.”

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PART SIX: How Hispanics can Fail

For Hispanics to not take advantage of the greater opportunities opening up for college-educated bilingual, bicultural individuals, they will have to:

• Shoot themselves in the foot by having limited interest in making any adjustments necessary to fit into American corporate culture.
• Have more-out-of-wedlock children.
• Not read with their children, instead shooing them away to a television set or computer or tablet or smartphone, in effect training them to be clickers on short attention span digital devices providing instant information gratification.
• Buy into “entitlement” as the basis for achieving progress.
• Disrespect long-time citizens who believe there is room for reasonable differences of opinion on the specifics of immigration reform, while simultaneously knowing that neither more walls nor open borders are logically part of said reform
• Learn minimal English.

Or maybe, instead of “failure,” there could be a change in the metric of “success,” where it shifts from economic stability and generational upward mobility, which are measurable, to something approximating “happiness.” (The little known country of Bhutan measures this concept with something called “Gross National Happiness.”) Perhaps many Latinos will shun the stress associated with financial advancement and be satisfied with “just enough,” in which case their importance in the country’s apparent economic position will be understated.

On the negative side politically, reactionary steps taken by a white power structure obviously cannot be dismissed as an ongoing obstacle to Latino progress. If substantive, the result of this obstruction would be continued growth in the underground or shadow economy, which statistically would also obscure Latino progress.

Part Seven will provide the results of a professionally-done survey of high school and college graduates concerning a long list of educational matters. The responses weave in and out of many of the points made in the above parts of this series.

HISPANIC CULTURE THROUGH A WHITE LENS …. concluding comments

I know that some will equate certain responses in the Part Seven table, and certain of my comments as well, as representing degrees of forced assimilation with “white culture/power.” Phrased in such a manner, it is a slippery slope to the tag of “selling out,” a negative to those who subscribe to the thesis that assimilation is somewhat a war of cultures, rather than an attempt by a person/family to make peace in an environment they did not create and where their political influence is less than their representation in the population.

As an important side note, looking ahead, there should be a leveraged impact in the Hispanic community when it comes to politics: the number eligible to vote will rise and the percentage of those eligible who do vote should rise as well. The collateral benefit should be a stronger connection of Hispanic parents to the educational process, at every level. This would be good news for Latino students and for society.

In the meantime, consistent with the desire for more proactive/individual responsibility, I believe there are many mini-steps which the Latino student should be taking. He does not have to wait for an inversion of political power. He can simultaneously be an advocate for change while preparing himself for the workplace, for the career he wants as a means to the end of having a productive and happy life. What he should not do is deliberately forego incremental education because the professor and/or the institution represents a power structure that is under challenge.

Spontaneity, an enviable trait in many instances, must nonetheless be secondary to intentionality when it comes to aspirations. Leaving aside the longer-term challenges in creating a life, establishing a family, and pursuing a career, it is not possible for a person to complete high school with sufficient academic preparation for college, and then enroll and graduate, while simply making a series of in-this-moment decisions.

Maybe my individualistic point of view is too much of an American culture hang-up. Ultimately, though, it is the individual – yes, aided and abetted and loved by those around him – who must envision the future, plan, flex, ask for help, negotiate the shoals, and persevere. Only then can he or she walk to the stage for their diploma.

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PART FOUR: Questions for the Hispanic Family

There is a long list of positive Hispanic attributes which presumably find their way into the qualitative measure of family happiness. Nonetheless, if one is dispassionately examining the impact on the future college student of the prototypical Hispanic family—with the emphasis here being the family relatively new to the subject of American colleges—many topics need to be addressed within the community, even with the evidence of increased high school completion and college graduation rates.

For example, shunning any attempt to put the questions below in an opinionated order of importance, it seems to me that without answers, there is a danger that much of the discussion about the education landscape may be moot.

• How does a high schooler argue the opposite view to that of a relative who espouses “simply” working hard, not college, as the appropriate path? After all, that is how he got his house and car.
• How and when does the college message get to the noisy, less than totally organized dining room table? Constant communication within the family is not the same as a consistent message about a particular topic.
• How does the outsider argue against the father who owns a successful restaurant—albeit with only a dozen tables—and basically says, “what was good enough for me (high school graduation at best) is good enough for my children,” and therefore does not want them to attend college?
• What about the parents who are adamant about the family incurring no debt if a child does go to college, because both here and in their home country, they have only known cash transactions, perhaps with the exception of an informal installment payment deal on an old car?
• In reverse fashion, how does one react to the desire of many Latino students to quickly “give back” to their parents, with the giving meaning money for household bills or getting mom out of that lousy factory job or cleaning office buildings at midnight? The contrast of immediate incoming cash from the student having a job, perhaps in the underground economy, and the large outlay of funds needed for college can be a deal-breaker for the latter.
• What if nobody talks about the impact of single-parent families or the absence of independent reading—which could be stimulated by the child seeing his or her parents reading—or the possibility that non-school socioeconomics are not really the dominant issue but rather it is the abysmal urban school system in which many Hispanic kids are trapped? The connection of in-home attention to education—with a heavy dose of reading—to better performance at school may be interpreted as partially a comment about the need for change at the schools themselves.
• How many parents would swallow hard as their child goes off to college and agree that “a person accepts true responsibility for his/her behavior when the behavior is chosen in the absence of strong outside pressure?”
• How does a young Latina react when her mother says she can start as an undereducated secretary and work her way up? Or when her father pushes her to the local two-year college so that he can “protect her.”
• The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports that the more young people eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink, or do drugs. Does the advantage here go to Hispanics? Not if the television is the “conversation” centerpiece for the meal.
• Do parents react with dismay when their young person wants to change high schools, to be in a better educational environment even if it means consorting with mostly gringos?
• How many people of any ethnicity would whisper in their child’s ear, “do not listen to, for example, Uncle Jose or Aunt Maria—they are not good role models.”
• Will the Hispanic family pay increased attention to nutrition and fitness, each of which is tied to basic health and energy, which in turn can be important to aspiration. One in six Hispanic children is considered obese.
• Besides what may be minimal financial assistance from Mom and Dad, will the Latino student be restricted in his selection of a four-year college by a short bungee cord—how far away will be acceptable to the parents?
• What happens when upon graduation—which has a sharply higher chance of happening if the family is supportive of their child’s decision-making on the utilization of time, energy, and money—the student, now an independent person by most measures, is offered a nice job at a far-off company? Will family tightness argue against taking it?
• Is there a pride factor which causes resistance to adopting cultural and educational approaches that do not come from within the community?
• Will bickering within the Hispanic community, as its constituents not only self-identify by home country but shun political collaboration because of long-held nationalist grudges, nullify its overall demographic advantage, leaving political power concentrated in the hands of those who are unified?

Correct, it is not fair to raise questions without providing a few “answers.” Continue to Part Five.

PART FIVE: A few Suggestions for the Hispanic Family

I believe it is important for the warm, inclusive, tight-knit, communicative Hispanic family to consider a few alterations in the way parents think about their children and their higher education aspirations:

• They should be more expansive in their geographical acceptance, i.e. recognize it is better for the kids to “go away” to the college that fits their career passion than to stay close and always be wondering about how it would have been if they had enrolled at the college of their choice.
• They must be understanding if and when students have to beg off some family interaction in order to study or write a lengthy paper.
• The entire family circle, which typically includes aunts and uncles and cousins, must be emotionally supportive, with both parents in particular being on the same page even if one of them has to fake it a little. Without support, success can happen, but it will be random, not systematic—the result of an exceptional student moving ahead, not a process which is applicable to every aspiring child in the family.
• I love kids, but everybody needs to ease up on the pressure for babies.
• They cannot fear independent political/cultural thinking by their children.
• They should not equate individual, proactive decision-making with selling-out to American values.

I know some readers are getting twitchy, saying I do not adequately understand the culture or that I have not connected these comments with the problem of proper documentation. There is undoubtedly a bit of truth in the former reaction, but assuredly I know how critical “status” is in thinking about both cultural norms and academic aspiration in America.

The above suggestions for Hispanic families stand on their own merits—they are good changes, regardless of status. The hope in my various writings is that Latino students can find the right mix of hard data and soft inputs to assist them in making decisions, in finding a place in the higher education or marketable skill world that is attractive to them, understandable to their parents, and affordable.

Of course, there is always a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. See Part Six.

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PART TWO: Qualitative Characteristics of Latino Students aided by the WKBJ Foundation

Based on extensive interactions, my belief structure is that the Latino student has:

• A greater need for sheer information about higher education options
• An unclear understanding (like many of his peers for sure) of the link between individual actions and eventual consequences
• The tailwind of demographic change at his back
• An above-average probability that non-credit remedial and/or English language courses will be required in college

• A need for help on how to apply to, finance and graduate from college
• Reduced education options because of the high cost of attending a four-year college
• A struggle with respect to understanding the importance of self-advocacy
• A need, when college is either not feasible or not sought, to know that learning a marketable skill is a valid path to a sustainable economic life
• To be shown he can profit from more planning and less in-this-moment thinking when it comes to making decisions
• To better understand the education system, with its non-existent national standards
• To define a degree of individualism which is comfortable and rewarding
• A prospective advantage over peers as employers come to realize that hiring a bilingual person only helps them to understand language, whereas having a bilingual/bicultural person in an important position helps them to grasp how their customers or clients or patients think and make decisions

It is best to think of these beliefs as an “all other things being equal” listing as again, the impact of DOCUMENTATION ISSUES is not incorporated.

In any case, what is the Latino educational attainment comparison … on to Part Three.

PART THREE: Educational Attainment

According to the highly-respected Pew Research Center, Hispanic high school completions are now 86%, versus 67% twenty years ago, and the college headcount has tripled. Good news. Simultaneously, there is considerable room for improvement. Among Hispanics 25-29 years of age, 15% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 40% for their white counterparts.

Over the years, these are explanations which have been offered by various people for the lower rate of educational attainment, coupled with my brief comments on those reasons:

• Families do not care                            all the surveys contradict this slander
• Poverty of spirit                                    not sure what that means in real life
• Social readiness                                  cultural awareness is a challenge
• Documentation                                    obviously a critical factor
• Poor educational preparation                “an urban A is a suburban C”
• Lack of financial aid                              especially affecting undocumented students
• First in family issues                              nobody has direct knowledge of college
• Command of the language                     confuses analysis of the academic level
• No emphasis on reading                        a problem that hurts
• Single parent fatigue                              long hours cut the ability to help
• Quinceañera impact                             girls want to prove they are women
• Financial illiteracy                                  not unique to Hispanics
• Poverty of dollars                                 this is real in many instances
• No emphasis on writing                        another national issue, albeit quieter than reading

Each of these is worthy of a fairly lengthy analysis, although not here. Instead, I am proceeding to Part Four, which provides my own set of relevant questions.

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For over two decades, I have been Executive-Director, and sole staff, of a non-profit foundation seeking to advance the educational aspirations of students in and around the 20,000 population, predominantly Hispanic town of Dover, New Jersey. Located about 40 miles due west from midtown Manhattan, Dover has an urban rhythm to it, while economically it is the hole in the affluent donut of Morris County. My “Thoughts from Twenty Years in the Educational Trenches” are summarized in a book subtitled, “A Unique College Guide for Latino Students and Their Supporters.” In addition, there is a slimmed-down version, the Latino College Assistance Guide, in both English and Spanish.

The seven-part compilation of observations which follows, excerpted in part from the above, is the informational background which has led me to conclude that higher education aspiration levels for Hispanic students would be more fully actualized with a more proactive approach and a deeper examination of the “I” factor, individual responsibility.

I say this while fully recognizing that external factors — the challenges and functional vagaries of the immigration system and the institutional obtuseness of many colleges, to name two – are valid constraints. They are not amenable to being changed by or for a lone individual.

However, the clear existence of said impediments should not prevent personal follow-through on those components of the educational picture where individual commitment can prove successful.

On to Part One.

PART ONE: Educational Characteristics of Latino Students aided by the WKBJ Foundation

When I think of the Latino student in my office, I see a young person who, in no order of importance, is more likely than the average student seeking higher education to:

• Have attended a subpar public high school
• Be the first in his/her family to attend college
• Be in a situation where the use of debt has been shunned
• Have a family involved in most decisions of each of its members
• Attend a two-year college if going on to higher education
• Attend a university close to home, if enrolling in a four-year school
• Be relatively new to the United States
• Be surrounded by people who have a strong belief in fate
• Have an innate advantage in being both bilingual and bicultural
• Have parents who grew up in a country with a national education system
• Have “DNA” skewed more toward collaboration than American individualism
• Find, upon visiting his home country after a decade away, that his psyche has shifted to    that of being more like an American
• Be fully conversant with every new iDevice, but not equally likely to have non-school reading material at home
• Revere futbol, a fascinating game long on process but short on closure
• Be Catholic
• Experience family health problems which hurt the student’s ability to stay in school
• Be in a family with below-average income
• Understand that if he or she succeeds educationally, the benefits accrue to themselves first, but to their family and future generations as well
• Wonder on dark days whether returning to their home country, which they may no longer know well, is the more comfortable place to live
• Be with people who have come to the United States with an inadequate understanding of its many financial and educational challenges
• Ponder the pros and cons of a “business” marriage when the years go by, with no immigration reform, and falling in love with a documented spouse wanes in probability
• Come from a culture where the Ps—priests, parents, police, politicians—are more important to an individual’s daily life
• Have inexpensive cars with big mechanic bills that can hurt college affordability

Obviously excluded from the above list are DOCUMENTATION ISSUES, which “simply” affect every aspect of the Hispanic student’s life: education, aspiration level, language acquisition, career path, role in the family, relationship to friends, self-identity. The subject of “papers” is best treated separately, with an in-depth analysis of all the variables.

Part Two will delineate qualitative characteristics of Latino students.

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Some time ago, I read that a significant number of Silicon Valley executives had enrolled their children in schools which were not big users of educational technology. Interesting, somewhat like the management of Coca-Cola telling their kids to lay off the soft drinks.

Fast forward to a January 2, 2016 “Wall Street Journal” article by Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Teach your Children Well: unhook them from Technology.” It describes the use in an increasing number of charter schools of the Waldorf educational methodology, which includes “low technology, delayed formal reading instruction, extensive instruction in art and science, and physical exercises to break up their lessons.”

The interesting part from the standpoint of today’s iDevice-dominated world is the assertion that “teachers … can immediately tell who has been using devices at home. ‘We see it in their behavioral problems, their (in)ability to reason, their cognitive skills, even their (in)ability to communicate with other people.’”

With iDevices in the vast majority of homes, including those of children eligible for Title I funding, “the real digital divide is between parents who realize the harmful effects of technology on their children and try to limit them, and those who don’t.”

Food for thought, especially given the historical lack of correlation between computer penetration and academic improvement.

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Because there is a growing desire to cease evaluating a person based on his or her body of work, I am suggesting a new evaluative tool, the Rules of Normative Thinking and Behavior (RNTB).

A panel of college students at highly selective schools, aided by their history professors, should be charged with the responsibility of creating this list of acceptable thoughts and actions. The composition of said panel would be determined using an algorithm that incorporates disproportionate weight for those sectors of the population who heretofore have been under-empowered. Following the creation of RNTB, the next step would be a Google search of all entries which include the names of individuals.

Each person’s thoughts and actions would be tested according to the RNTB rubric. If he or she receives a negative checkmark on at least one part of the RNTB, this is what must happen with any reference to that transgressing individual:

*all relevant books must be burned

*all statues, plaques, and commemorative displays must be demolished

*all CDs or DVDs must be melted

*all website entries must be deleted

Apps will be created to troll the universe of intellectual property in all iDevices and their physical counterparts to ascertain whether any violations of the above requirements are taking place.

Those individuals who have voiced appropriate adverse thoughts about people who are on the RNTB list must be cleansed themselves, because having any opinion is considered to be evidence of thinking, and minds would be at risk of being changed.

The list of names subject to historical cleansing would be open-ended. If the RNTB is amended by the designated panel, then additional names can be added at any time. Note that once an individual is cleansed, there is no way to become un-cleansed.

The Rules of Normative Thinking and Behavior will allow the envisioned new society to unfold in an unfettered fashion. Clarity of what is appropriate will be maximized, which will have the added benefit of reducing stress: a win-win for all of us.

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Let’s call him “BeeGee.” Like all capitalists, he attempted to create a monopoly for a product that everybody wanted, and he came so close that he made a major amount of money, too much in the view of his social policy critics. So what if his enterprise employed thousands of people who willingly came to work. By the metric of oversized income and assets, BeeGee has to be confronted. Therefore, it is resolved that the government confiscate a substantial portion of his assets and use the monies to house the homeless and fix the roads. But please do not create any obstruction to BeeGee’s ability to invent products that millions use every day.

The prototypical hedge fund manager is stereotypically a bad guy because his activities produce nothing. His wealth is because each day he says to the mirror, “I Can,” and he risks substantial capital to back up an observation that some securities are overvalued and some are undervalued. He has no right to use his money to pay $100 million for a painting. Therefore, it is resolved that the government confiscate a substantial portion of his assets and use the money to pay the college tuition of financially challenged young people. I am not worried about his ability to make money in the future; he is really smart, works 24/7,  knows every paragraph of the tax code, and has broken no laws.

Some 0.1% wealth category people are like oracles. They see the future well, and their brainchildren assist the entire evolution to TechnoWorld. But should somebody be allowed to spend $100 million on a boat race, like one of these people did. No, that is not helpful to society. Therefore, it is resolved that the government confiscate an equal amount of his assets, to be devoted to the food stamp program.

Both the bank account and annual earnings of this MD are clearly excessive (even by doctors’ standards). However, I, and millions of others, am using his terrific product, so by that definition, he has to be considered a good guy.  But how can I give him a pass—he is superrich.  Policy problem?

And now there is a new entry in the super-rich classification, the winner of the Powerball lottery. He or she (or they) will have created nothing, risked but a few dollars, hired nobody, and have had no impact on anybody in the process of gaining said wealth. If history is any guide, the winner will be portrayed as something of a hero … and will proceed to dissipate a good portion of his largesse.

Overall, how do we assess the legitimacy of one’s income and assets, fairly earned? Can we talk about income inequality as we sip coffee priced at double that of the little place around the corner and put more money in the pocket of Starbucks? How should we think about the wealth of Mark Zuckerberg when we regard his service as indispensable; in fact, we cannot even remember life before Facebook.

Did Apple become the world’s most valuable company because of a singular coherent decision by a governing entity? Of course not; it is the result of most of us (worldwide in fact) loving a product so much that we do not care about the wealth we are creating for people who financially are already “beyond category,” as they say in the Tour de France.

Once the projected policymaker gets past closing various tax loopholes and simplifying the tax code itself, all to the good, how does he think about the actual tax rate?

Clearly it should be raised for upper income individuals. However, to couple that advocacy with a suggestion that high incomes and large asset positions are to be considered the evil consequences of an ugly economic system, that is somehow separate from the cumulative decisions of the rest of us, is to be completely hypocritical as this short enumeration of different situations demonstrates.

Maybe Bernie has a consistent answer to the question of which billionaires should be bashed.

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