(March 18, 2020 at 10:02 am)Succubus#2 Wrote: From the Guardian. No link but it's easy enough to find.
Quote:“Reasons for differences in degree award by student’s religion during their time in [higher education] are complex and difficult to disentangle from other characteristics associated with religion,”
Yes no doubt, there must be no end of variables involved but this:
Quote:The researchers found that the gap between Muslims and others got wider as the proportion of Muslims studying at an institution fell. Universities with Muslims making up just 3% of students saw the worst outcomes compared with their peers...
Appears to be in conflict with this:
Quote:The researchers also noted that the performance of Muslim students was inversely related to the proportion of Muslim staff at an institution: for every additional percentage point of Muslim staff, the attainment gap between Muslims and non-Muslims shrank by more than by two percentage points.
WTF? I eagerly await an explanation for this from our Muslim colleagues.
Quote:Jewish students were the most academically successful among all groups: nearly nine out of 10 graduated with a first or 2.1 degree. And eight out of 10 students with no religion also achieved a first or 2.1.
Every picture tells a story.
Does the research factor in other socioeconomic factors?
For example, it may be (I don't know) that Muslim students are more likely to be immigrants or the children of immigrants. They may well be at a disadvantage in their primary education. Likewise, they may be living in poorer areas with lots of immigrants, or lower tax bases, in the schools aren't as good.
Peter Hitchens has written a lot about how in the bad old days high schools could select students by merit, but the new system means that kids in rich areas, or kids with very rich parents, have clear advantages.
I don't know... I'm just thinking we should look at likely factors apart from religion.
When I went to high school in a totally podunk town with a barely-functioning high school, I was told that it's impossible to study for the SAT entrance exam. Then I got to New York and all the rich kids said they had been taking SAT prep courses for years before the exam. They had full-time counsellors and special tutoring included in their schools. They had full time placement officers in their high schools whose job it was to get them into the best college.
Some of those kids were genuinely smarter than me, but some of them weren't -- they were the kids of rich parents who had their hands held all through college, who did the minimum amount of work anyway, and got great jobs out of college because of connections. They were generous with their cocaine, though, as a way of having us not hate them.
Anyway, there need to be many other things factored in to such a study.
