Jordan Peterson on education: what the evidence says · JRE #877

“we've raised their grade point average of their kids 25 percent, dropped their dropout rate the same, and it's had a walloping effect on men and on non-Western ethnic minorities. It's moved the non-Western ethnic minority student population performance at Rotterdam School of Management from 70 percent below the average to above the female Dutch natives.”

What the evidence says

Peterson is referring to a 2015 peer-reviewed study he co-authored with Michaela Schippers and Ad Scheepers evaluating an online goal-setting writing intervention (marketed commercially as "Self Authoring") given to first-year students at a large Dutch business school, widely identified as Rotterdam School of Management. The published results do not match the figures Peterson cites: the paper reports that ethnic minority male students earned 44% more course credits (not a 25% GPA increase) and saw their retention rate rise 54% (not a 25% cut in dropout), while the gender achievement gap closed by 98% and the ethnicity gap closed by 38% in year one, rising to 93% by year two. The paper contains no figure describing minority students moving from "70 percent below average" to outperforming Dutch native women; pre-intervention dropout among ethnic minority students is reported at roughly 62%, not 70%, and framed in different terms than Peterson's phrasing suggests. The study's own competing-interests disclosure states a per-student fee was paid to Peterson by the participating business school for use of the intervention, giving him a direct financial interest in the program's reported success. The underlying research is real, peer-reviewed, and does report substantial positive effects for minority and male students, but Peterson's specific spoken statistics do not correspond to the numbers the paper actually reports.

1. A scalable goal-setting intervention closes both the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap (Palgrave Communications, 2015) · journal