A Plan for Improving Our Ethics

Per the previous post, I am deeply concerned that poor ethics is devastating society. That post briefly described a possible solution. I flesh that out here.

To effect such a fundamental change in people's values I believe requires a program that starts nearly at birth and continues well into adulthood:

-- Parenting education (as part of LaMaze and other pre-birth parenting education--e.g,. in the post-birth hospital room), including stressing the primacy of teaching your child that ethics must trump expediency.

-- Pre-K-through-graduate school. Every year or two, students create (for example, as a term paper) a model ethics training program for slightly younger students. Such an approach immerses the students in the process, unlike in a lecture should generate minimum defensiveness, and provides an ongoing source of improved ethics courses.

There would be only three rules for that course development:
-- Its goal must be to change the fabric of a student's thinking process so s/he will almost reflexively choose ethics over expediency.
-- It must be critical-incident based, e.g., for elementary school students: bullying, for high school students: cheating, for business-school students: withholding negative information to sell a product.

-- It must put students in the shoes of the victim of ethical malfeasance. For example, when, to make more money, a surgeon recommends surgery when drug treatment would do, imagine how the patient feels on hearing he "needs," how his family feels, how he feels when he's checking into the hospital, wheeled into surgery, etc.

Optional component: A contest for the best ethics courses. Every year, there would be winners--a la the National Science Fair or Spelling Bee.

-- To extend the ethics "curriculum" beyond the school years, producers of public-service announcement, TV dramas and sitcoms, movies and video games would be encouraged to create story lines that present thorny ethical dilemmas: for example, where expediency would yield great benefit and the ethical violation to derive that benefit is not great.

Ethics Education: The most important topic that's so rarely taught

Today I received yet more reminders of how ethically deficient we are. On top of the Charlie Rangel outrage, in my own private practice just today, clients made the following statements:

"Lawyers often double-bill."

"I want to milk the education thing as long as I can so I don't have to grow up." Professional students waste class slots that could have gone to people who would use that slot to be productive, to better society.

"I flirt to get what I want and then I claim I feel violated when they flirt back." Beware.

As I've written before, physician clients admit to me that they do procedures, including surgeries, that could have more wisely been treated medically. Why? Simply to make more money.

All that ethical filth is on top of the corporate excesses, priests screwing parishioners (including children,) people lying on the resumes and income taxes, using synthetic urine to pass drug tests, and as I wrote about yesterday, hiring people to write their theses, etc., etc., etc.

A society in which integrity is lacking will be so much less than it otherwise could be.

What could help? Ethics courses have, of course, been taught for decades, especially in law and business schools, alas with only modest effectiveness. Nevertheless, my best proposal is, as I wrote yesterday, that a critical-incident-based ethics curriculum in which we feel the effects of unethical behavior on the victim, be suffused through K-16 education, including emphasizing the primacy of parents BEING ethical--No matter how much a parent urges their child to be ethical, if the parent behaves unethically, the kid will realize that the words are empty.

The message of ethics over expediency need be so woven into the fabric of all our citizens that people will reflexively, with little temptation, make the ethical choice, even if it leads to poverty.

Fortunately, ethical people are probably no more likely to end up impoverished by their integrity. They may even be rewarded for it.

How to Reduce Academic Dishonesty

This morning, I was on a syndicated Canadian radio show to comment about the now well-publicized company that writes college admissions essays, term papers, and theses for students.

The existence of such companies is, alas, not surprising, especially as times get ever tougher, because many people will do what's expedient to get into a good school, get good grades, land a job etc.

That, of course, is why ethically challenged people hire resume writers--to deceive employers into thinking the candidate writes, thinks, and organizes better than s/he, in fact, does. (If that's not the reason, as some resume writers have argued in response to a previous post, then why don't candidates add "This resume was written by Mary Jones, a professional resume writer?" Why don't resume writers, ever eager to get more clients, insist that candidates do so?

In this post, I propose solutions:

To reduce academic dishonesty, if professors made term papers, theses, etc. of greater learning value to the students, many more students would write them rather than pay someone else to write them in their name. After all, few students hire others to do their fieldwork or internship. For example, rather than asking students to write about the significance of the doppelganger in 18th century literature, why not ask them to interview ten people about how they managed to use their liberal arts education to improve their lives?"

Speaking of academic fraud, I know two people who went to Yale Law School. Both got in dishonestly. One wrote an admission essay claiming her father was a terrible sexist pig and she had to fight to conquer that. In fact, her father was a full-fledged feminist. The other student claimed to be Native American, when in fact, she was not.

Here's an approach to improving societal ethics more broadly: Have a K-16 ethics curriculum filled with simulations of real-life ethical dilemmas. That curriculum would also teach the primacy of teaching the students' children that the cosmically ethical choice is always wiser than expediency. And that that must not only be preached but practiced. If a parent preaches ethics but to get a discount, tells a restaurant cashier the child is 12 rather than the true 13, the kid gets the message that expediency trumps ethics.

Of course, colleges have filled even k-12 curriculum with so much arcana that professors deem essential (from the Peloponnesian Wars to quadratic equations), that there's no room in the curriculum. So let's wrest curriculum selection from those trivia-obsessed research professors and replace them with successful people from all walks of life, from ethical businesspeople to social workers, scientists to blue-collar workers.

We'd have a more ethical and better world.

A Good Question About ObamaCare

My wife forwarded this to me.

Let me get this straight . . . .

We're going to be "gifted" with a health care
plan we are forced to purchase and
fined if we don't,

which purportedly covers at least
ten million more people,
without adding a single new doctor,
but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,

written by a committee whose chairman
says he doesn't understand it,

passed by a Congress that didn't read it but
exempted themselves from it,

and signed by a President who smokes,

with funding administered by a treasury chief who
didn't pay his taxes,

for which we'll be taxed for four years before any
benefits take effect,

by a government which has
already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,

all to be overseen by a surgeon general
who is obese,

and financed by a country that's broke!

'What could
possibly go wrong?'

Another Example of Illegals Unfairly Benefiting at the Expense of Legal Residents

The ACLU proudly announced today that, thanks to the their efforts, California Supreme Court has ruled that illegals are eligible for in-state tuition at California public (taxpayer-funded) universities.

Great. So now, illegals admitted to Berkeley pay less than those who are legal residents of Arizona. And, of course, with universities' reverse discrimination admissions policies (the so-called "comprehensive admission criteria,") on average, those illegals get in with lower test scores and lower grades, resulting in many more qualified legal applicants being rejected. And illegal students, again at taxpayer expense, use far more than average amount of student services, creating shortages of advising, counseling, tutoring, etc., for legal residents. Despite all that, illegals' graduation rate is far lower than for legal residents--meaning that the taxpayers' investment in them did not pay off in their being professionals, let alone better professionals than if legal residents were admitted. Is this justice?

On Career Counseling and College Counseling

This morning, I was interviewed for an article or series on my thoughts related to career and college counseling. Here are a few ideas you might find helpful:

• Hiring a resume writer is no more ethical than a high school student hiring a professional to write his or her college application essay. Imagine you were looking to hire someone, even if it was a job working with their hands. Wouldn't you appreciate being able to judge how well the applicants organize their thoughts? When an applicant hires a resume writer, s/he gets an unfair advantage--the employer sees the resume writer's thinking and communication skills, not the applicant's. Resume writing is an unethical profession.
• It's far more valid to pick a career or job based on its meeting your career's non-negotiables (e.g., primarily using words, working at home, non-profit work, whatever) than by trying to come up with some career that matches your skills, interests, values, etc. An attempt at the latter usually fails for a variety of reasons (I've written about them HERE,) whereas the former succeeds far more often.
• High school counselors and college admissions people would be far more ethical if they stopped pushing nearly every inquirer to go to college. (They feel particular pressure to do so for "underrepresented" minorities.) Instead, using success-rate statistics as available, they should help the student decide whether s/he'd most likely be successful and happy at a four-year college (which by the way, usually takes much more than four years,) two-year college transfer program, short-term community college training program, apprenticeship, on-the-job learning, or self-employment.
• Career counselors would add far more value if they did not focus on helping people find a career or land a job. Instead, they should focus on helping people succeed in the current job, and learn how to be master users of Google--a window to so much information--if you know how to time-effectively access it.
  

The College Report Card: Key to higher ed accountability

If we require each drug to submit mountains of data to the FDA, if we require each food item to list how much protein, calcium, etc it contains, if we require each tire to have a tread life, traction, and temperature rating molded into its sidewall, shouldn't we require each institution of higher education to post, linked-to from its home page, a College Report Card that presented this information?:

(This version regards bachelor's-degree institutions but, of course, could be adapted to Associate and graduate degree programs, as well as disaggregated for transfer students.)

• Freshman-to-senior average growth in critical thinking, writing, quantitative reasoning, etc. (disaggregated by high school record)

(For you statisticians out there, a variable consisting of pre-post growth embeds significant error variance, but with the large N and that variable being only one of a number of indices of college quality, the wisdom of including a measure of growth outweighs the disadvantage of a large confidence interval. And if that argument is deemed inadequate, a reasonable proxy would be to use senior scores adjusted for high school weighted GPA and SAT score.)

• The results of a recent student satisfaction survey
• Four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates (disaggregated by high school record)
• The percentage of graduates professionally employed, including average salary. (disaggregated by high school record and by major)
• The accreditation team's most recent report on the college.

The first institution to voluntarily post such a College Report Card would get free PR from the media far more valuable than the fortunes that the institution spends on marketing to attract students.

I know that some readers of this blog are senior college administrators. If you're one, should you advocate for your institution being that first one to post such a College Report Card?

If you don't do it voluntarily, I predict that in light of the growing groundswell of articles questioning higher education's value as well as of the integrity of colleges' admissions operations, the federal government will mandate that you issue an independently audited report card. To encourage that, I have meetings scheduled with two potentially sympathetic legislators.