Response to Comment

Superdestroyer wrote...

How to you where the graduate students at the University of Chicago went to undergraduate let alone high school? Want to bet many of those Asian sounding names are Americans?

This is certainly possible. But my experience in graduate school would argue strongly against this. The students in graduate school with me with Asian sounding names almost universally did have foreign undergraduate preparation. And this phenomenom only becomes more pronounced when you climb up the academic food chain from the state schools I attended to the University of Chicago and other top schools.

My guess is that most of them just happen to come from social settings that emphasize hard work and do not look down at being "nerdy" but instead look down at being an "air head."

Well, then, that's an additional problem in our culture beyond what I've been discussing. But that is neither here nor there as to whether our high school and undergraduate math preparation is up to snuff. It's not. At the college level, our high school graduates can not compete with students trained in foreign high schools. To see evidence of this, all you have to do is look at the obscene number of remedial courses offered at even our "elite" colleges. And beyond that look at the courses offered which are not labelled remedial but which should be covered at the high school level.

• Introductory Algebra (wth is this anyway?)
• "College" Algebra (this is just a rehash of high school algebra)
• Trigonometry
• Pre-Calculus (I'm willing to cut a little bit of slack with this one, but really it belongs no later than the senior year of high school)

This then becomes a domino effect. At the graduate school level, our college graduates can no longer compete with students trained in foreign colleges.

My argument is that most of the upper middle class white kids who are capable of taking the math prep courses in undergraduate do not want to put in the hard work for majors in math or science because it would interfere with their social lives and their drinking.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree completely with this diagnosis. But I see this as a third problem (beyond my original point that U.S. math education is lacking and your earlier point that our culture looks down on "nerdy" behavior). I'm really most interested in the first problem. If as suggested by your comments (and I agree for the most part), cultural attitudes are such that math programs are not well populated by U.S. citizens, then so be it. But those programs at both the HS and undergrad levels need to have a higher level than they presently have!

As a final point, I will mention that you are very much mistaken if you think that if they wanted to, the upper middle class "white" kids (Latinos can be white too, you know) can still do well in a rigorous college math major after the sub-standard math curriculum they complete in high school. A few quick thoughts on this...

1. If you're not ready to take at the very least Calculus I (without preparatory "pre-calculus" courses and other such nonsense) your first semester in college, you will most likely never do particularly well in a math or physics major.
2. Without prior experience in difficult courses (in whatever field) requiring tons of homework, these students are often unable to handle the amount of work it takes to do even moderately well in college math courses. This is not generally a skill one develops on demand as soon as its need becomes suddenly apparent. Failure is the more common response to this situation.
3. Without the sharpening of the intellect that comes from an intellectually stimulating curriculum WAY before these students are even thinking about going to college, most of these students lack the necessary logical thinking abilities to be successful in such programs.

In my opinion, a sub-standard HS preparation in mathematics pretty much dooms these students to failure in undergraduate math, physics and engineering programs. Yes, the super-geniuses can always overcome this handicap and succeed. But the more average (who could have been successful in these programs if equipped with the right tools) will fail miserably.