But in thinking about the folderol it did prompt a thought. It seems to me that there is an interaction and graduation between, to use James Heckman's terminology, cognitive and noncognitive skills.Looking at this, it seems relevant to a phenomenon I have noted in recent years.
Cognitive skills are those associated with thinking - IQ of course but some of the finer subsidiary components such as maths, verbal, spatial, memory, etc. Noncognitive skills are those associated with motivation, integrity, futurity, work ethic, disposition towards saving, conscientiousness, etc.
In the past fifty years we have become exceptionally good at identifying and channeling people with high cognitive skills through SAT, ACT and college admissions. We find them and then channel them into flagship state universities or into private elite universities. We have also, as an unintended side effect, facilitated a couple of generations of assortative mating, creating a new, partially heritable elite. We then channel them into a handful of hothouse, dynamic cities. No wonder so many become somewhat divorced from the lives and concerns of the other 85% of the population. The cognitive elite are on a fairly remorseless and inexorable conveyor belt of talent.
As Heckman points out, however, it is not only cognitive skills which create value. The noncognitive skills mostly associated with bourgeois values (motivation, integrity, futurity, work ethic, disposition towards saving, conscientiousness, etc.) also are sources of productivity and value.
If you think about it, there is a natural matrix to be derived from these skills. A first attempt to begin to explore those trade-off gradations is below.
Click to enlarge.
Happy are those blessed with both high IQ and high non-cognitive skills. Their lives, absent exogenous tragedies, are golden. The world is their oyster. Really bright and really diligent, persevering, sociable, reliable, future-oriented, etc. In virtually any economy anywhere, anytime, they land on their feet.
Then there is everyone else with all sorts of variation and balance between cognitive and noncognitive skills. I have attempted to capture some of those recognizable stereotypes that you find in any large organization or society.
In addition to Cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills, there is a third important dimension not captured in this matrix and that is "Acquired Skills."
The field of academic mismatch is hotly contested, to some small degree around the data, to a much larger degree because of its inconvenience to postmodernist and critical theory; the received dogma in academic administrations.
In striving for "diversity" the most prestigious and competitive universities, think they are being good administrators, seek to achieve at least a minimal racial representation by reducing minimum required SAT scores by some hundreds of points.
The outcomes is predictable, despite the good intentions. Academically unprepared students struggle and perform poorly.
The result in many universities is all sorts of protests, concerned that poor performance is a result of some unperceived bias rather than simple academic mismatch.
Looking at the videos of the protests over the years; Dartmouth, Yale, Mizzou, Evergreen, Oberlin, etc., it is hard not to note that the student protest groups are dominated by racial minorities and otherwise societally marginalized groups (the morbidly obese, the neon hair, the tattoos, the metallically pierced and ringed, etc.). On the one hand, that makes logical sense given their own perceived victimization - if their hypothesis is true that the most liberal universities are also the most likely to be discriminating against them, then the video evidence makes sense.
But the alternative view, that the most academically mismatched are those most likely to do poorly and yet see their personal performance as a function of systemic bias is equally valid from a different perspective.
From this model perspective, there is an additional factor in play. Not only are the protesting students (green circle) protesting the natural outcomes from academic mismatch, i.e. that their academic capability is lower than those with whom they are competing, they also have another deficit.
Where do you go if you are trying to keep your academic head above water? You might have entered wanting to be pre-med, but you end up in academically undemanding fields which have a sympathetic message which takes the onus for outcomes off of you. Gender theory, Social Justice Theory, Postmodernism, etc. What else characterizes those fields? Intolerance, anger, speech suppression, righteousness, violence, etc. I.e. low non-cognitive capabilities.
Even if they did not enter university with low non-cognitive skills, those low non-cognitive skills are rewarded and cultivated.
Hence the double whammy. They get in by slipping cognitive standards and then suffering academic mismatch. That is then compounded by low non-cognitive skills where they are encouraged to believe that the norms to which everyone else must adhere, do not apply to them. They end up as the green dot, low cognitive and low non-cognitive capabilities in comparison to their peers admitted under the common standards.
No wonder they are angry. Through the best of intentions they are placed in the worst of positions.
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