James G. Martin Center

It seems like you're not at all understanding what I've been saying. The measure of teacher performance was based on student improvement over time on standardized tests. It is incredibly valuable to measure a teacher's capability in actually helping students learn and improve. After all, isn't that the sole purpose of teaching? > That's because I didn't understand what your argument was. The usual argument is "teachers unions mean teachers are bad at their jobs so we can't trust their judgement and GPA. Instead, we need to look to standardized tests." That's the argument I thought you were making. Yes, and we've also gone pretty far off-topic from what I was originally talking about at this point. > No, it doesn't. It does give the citation: Then why not lead with that citation and not the very weak conference paper that you chose to lead with? Anyways, you may be right about GPA currently being a better predictor of academic success than the ACT. But, as this article explains: https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/02/gpa-or-sat-two-measures-are-be… "In an extended version of their essay, Kuncel and Sackett acknowledge that GPA is the best predictor of student success, but they add: “Even better prediction is obtained by the combination of test scores and high school grade point average.” “Human behavior is notoriously difficult to forecast,” they write, “it would be strange for a single predictor to be the only one that matters. So it is also valuable to…

This guy has another article where he discusses AP economics (college level econ taken in high school with a test at the end that can be applied for college credit) as being superior to undergrad econ 101. I think that's an interesting position to write about. I tend to agree. My decade past high school experience found the AP courses were excellent. I did almost a dozen of them. https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/ap-economics-is-a-model-of-aca… I think most of his points in the featured article are missing the point even if his thesis is generally correct. In my memory, most students were pretty poor. Lots of them did not understand how to learn. They tried to get through class and make up for it later, and then found that hard, and so they gave up, then scraped by because the classes themselves weren't really all that hard and you could do fine without understanding it. I can't imagine this guy's econ 101 is very different. Now imagine that cohort after a couple years of being half tuned into remote learning classes? Yeah they probably suck at school. I only learned how to be a student in the last couple years of high school. If I was instead just playing video games while half listening to a zoom for those two years I'd probably be a lot worse off too.

and there's also the Ivy League grade inflation... https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/11/harvard-admits-that-grades-have-lo…

The site itself is also highly political, and the author even more so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_Academic_Rene… https://www.jamesgmartin.center/author/georgeleef/ https://www.nationalreview.com/author/george-leef/

A recent think tank article is "Higher Education and the Law of Diminishing Returns: Shortening the average time-to-degree makes economic sense." https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2023/03/higher-education-and-the-law-o…

I will read this pdf and bing some articles about "total public funding" and see what I believe. https://www.jamesgmartin.center/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Bennett_Hyp…

No, he would be right. Source: https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2014/07/do-librarians-need-a-masters-d…

Citing increases in fraud and retractions, this article makes the case that as funding has increased, scientific quality has worsened. (Which is counter to what I guessed above!) Pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake replaced by obsession with grant cycles. https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/01/the-intellectual-and-moral-dec… But lots of other things have also changed that may or may not be causes: - many fewer tenure track positions - many more jobs in industry that require or value a 4 year or advanced degree - obtaining a college degree as a right of passage seen as increasingly essential to you g adulthood - the rise of data science: more jobs in industry that have access to lots of data and demand scientific rigor - the rise of private cloud supercomputing (is deep mind) vs, say, a public university's cluster - the obsession in some foreign countries of getting advanced degrees from American universities, creating essentially a guest visa workforce that is easily abused - rise of Big Tech which has money to throw at things like protein folding

2006 - https://www.the-scientist.com/uncategorized/are-we-training-too-many-s… - "Are We Training Too Many Scientists? A glut of postdocs, too few desired positions, and a faculty invested in the status quo point to a need for change. Who will take responsibility?" 2013 - https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/too-many-scientists/5820.articl… - "Too many scientists? The proliferation of PhDs is unsustainable and damaging, says Paula Stephan." 2010 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us-produce-too-m/ - "Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists? American science education lags behind that of many other nations, right? So why does it produce so many talented young researchers who cannot find a job in their chosen field of study?" 2018 - https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/02/science-discontents-jobs-many-… "Science and Its Discontents: Too Few Jobs—or Too Many Scientists?"

As mentioned in a reddit thread(1) of the same article: "Let's see, average amount of student loan debt per graduate is $30k. Student loans are usually a life-altering debt, designed to take decades to pay off. That means for every year this chode gets paid $1M, 33.3 students are stuck with paying off his yearly salary for the next 20 years. " And that's just 1 person. And it's pretty easy to connect the dots to the real problem, being that of administration is the one making the rules now for education, not the faculty and academics. (2) (3) Now, there is an argument that because more regulations and laws are passed, that is why administration is being.. bloated. I'm not so sure how true this is, but is is another factor that does seem to take a part of the whole situation. (4) (1) https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7j755s/number_of_college_presid… (2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/06/administrative-bloat-campus-ac… (3) http://volokh.com/2010/08/24/administrative-bloat-at-universities/ (4) https://www.chronicle.com/article/Think-College-Costs-Too-Much-/146641

In higher ED this seems like a long time coming. Grad students essentially work as slaves for the Uni's & professors with triple-duty in lab time for professor + teaching + self-research. Their reward comes in notoriety & bi-lines on research that helps them become professors in their own right in higher ed. The cost is minimized rights to IP they've been crucial in inventing, outrageously low wages, and an average of $100k (1) in debt. The brutality is sold as a right of passage, but the reality is the incentives are completely out of whack - uni's have an inverse incentive to admit Phd / grad students to benefit from the wage-slave / revenue generating aspect. And it shows in the data - there are now a "glut" of PhD's that are far outpacing the very limited # of academic positions. The system needs fixing and if unionization exerts some pressure on correcting the macro problem I am all for it. (1) https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/25/how-much-outstanding-l… (2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2016/10/academic-job-market-tottering-…