Again, such a thoughtful piece. You need a bigger forum and a lot more followers. I dropped out of school at fifteen or sixteen and didn't go back until I was about 35 when I got an equivalency certificate and went to school to study CS. As a kid I was a poor student at good public junior high and high schools. The collapse in standards between 1970 and 1985 was jaw dropping. The standards for twenty-somethings in college, first at Hunter College, then at Columbia University, were strikingly lower than they'd been when I was in the ninth grade. The better papers people submitted would have been thrown back in your face by poor Mrs Jacobs, with a demand to speak with your parents underlined in red pencil, with a visible mark where the pencil point had snapped. After an MS I went on to work at a famous research lab, and the standards were even lower. They had program you were expected to run your documents through that computed the target level. You were told to aim for first year of college. That's only twenty years after I dropped out--one full generation. It wasn't just English. I took intro to biology and never bothered to buy the textbook. I was among the top students with what I'd learned in ninth-grade biology fifteen years earlier. The push to get rid of H1 visas makes me laugh out loud. Who do they think will do all the work that requires mental skills? Even in 1990 when I finished my degree, the top places were majority immigrant. My GF at Hunter did her work-study in the physics department. I noticed a picture on the wall of about thirty Asian kids posing together. I said something like "Oh that's cute--all the Asian kids got together for a photo." She laughed out loud. "No, that's everyone in the department." Every single student in the department was from China. It wasn't that different in CS--the student body was more diverse, but American-born kids were already becoming exotic. Americans kids just aren't interested, and those that are seem to be second-generation from immigrant families. I'm betting their kids don't go for it either.
