THE HIGH SCHOOLS AREN'T DOING THEIR JOB. A professor of accounting counts the ways.

The lower tail of yesteryear’s population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.

To begin, today’s average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.

Via Joanne Jacobs, where the ensuing bull session includes the requisite cautions about generalizing from a small sample.

RUNNING EXTRA. Critical Mass notes that recognizing there is a problem matters.

[The accounting professor] goes on to speculate about the why of it all, citing the usual suspects--failure of K-12 education, the self-esteem movement's hijacking of of our culture, breakdown of family, failure of universities to insist on qualified students and uninflated grades. You won't find anything in that part of the article that you haven't seen before. But the "why" is perhaps, at this point, less important than simply establishing the "what." There is so much denial about that--and until we can get people to agree on the nature of the problem, explanations and solutions are really beside the point.