For the last few years, even higher education’s most ardent boosters have admitted the industry has a serious cost problem. They try to console borrowers with stories about the value — both transcendent and practical — of a college diploma. The best salespeople liberally sprinkle in empathy for families who are paying truly outrageous attendance costs. As student debt grows unabated, however, we’re now witnessing the emergence of a new line: The problem is not so bad.
Earlier this week, a report from the Brookings Institution made waves for implying that the answer to its titular question “Is a Student Loan Crisis on the Horizon?” is “no.” The report’s authors Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos conclude, after a very narrow evaluation of cherry-picked data sets, that borrowers can afford the cost of higher education, and that the system is not out of whack. David Leonhardt, managing editor of the New York Times explainer vertical The Upshot, more or less reprinted a dissent-free summary of the report as fact on the paper’s third page — near-perfect traction for Brookings.
Some other commentators have poked holes in the Brookings report, but the Times placement means it’s probably too late. Already in offices and classrooms and bars across the nation, citizens who fancy themselves well informed are no doubt third-hand-explaining away the student debt crisis. Maybe the incoming class of 2018 took a deep sigh of relief when they opened Tuesday’s paper and emailed it around. Akers and Chingos have changed the conversation on student loans, but not for the better. At least not for borrowers.
Category Archives: Student Support
9 Things I Learned as a Software Engineer
Three years ago I was working in a neuroscience lab in Barcelona, busy putting electrodes on people and teaching classes on cognitive systems. Today I design and write software for a living.
Of course back in science I wrote a lot of software — if you want to make any sense of 40 GB of brain scan data you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and write scripts to crunch those numbers, and I was always a good programmer. But it wasn’t until I quit my job (and possibly my future) in academia and started working for a small and ambitious start-up that I understood what being a software engineer — and more importantly, being in the business of software engineering — is really about. It’s not knowing more programming languages, libraries, algorithms, and design patterns. It’s a mindset.
Facebook has conducted a secret massive psychology experiment on its users to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages – without telling participants
Over 600,000 Facebook users have taken part in a psychological experiment organised by the social media company, without their knowledge.
Facebook altered the tone of the users’ news feed to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends, which were seen on their news feed.
They then monitored the users’ response, to see whether their friends’ attitude had an impact on their own.
“The results show emotional contagion,” wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal – Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States.
Anatomy of a Swim Meet
I have three kids, and they all swim on a swim team every summer. I decided to capture my experience at a morning swim meet, for those of you not in the water cult.
6:00 a.m.: Wake up, drink coffee. Wake up grouchy children.
6:45 a.m.: Arrive at pool. Parking lot is already full. Let the kids out and park far away. Carry/drag chairs, bags and a cooler as if I were large pack animal. It occurs to me suddenly that as mother of three there is no denying that I am a large pack animal.
6:58 a.m.: Small miracle occurs. I find a great place to set up chairs, etc. Next to friends. With a good view of the pool. In full shade. Wish I’d brought a sweatshirt actually, it’s kind of chilly.
7:00 a.m.: Kids jump into the freezing cold pool for warm-ups and exchange looks with each other like — WHY DO WE DO THIS AGAIN?
7:30 a.m.: Children begin harassing me for money for the snack bar. I try to hand them something healthy from the cooler. Suddenly every other kid at the swim meet is eating large, chocolate-frosted doughnuts.
Over 100,000 African-American Parents Are Now Homeschooling Their Children
We hear so much about the plight of Black children and their low test scores. We have not heard that African American children who are homeschooled are scoring at the 82% in reading and 77% in math. This is 30-40% above their counterparts being taught in school. There is a 30% racial gap in schools, but there is no racial gap in reading if taught in the home and only a 5% gap in math.
What explains the success of African American students being taught by their parents? I believe that it’s love and high expectations. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington High School. They were honored several years ago for producing the greatest turnaround as a Recovery school. The principal had the opportunity to pick and choose her staff and emphatically stated, “If you want to teach in this school you must love the students”. Researchers love promoting that the racial gap is based on income, marital status, and the educational background of the parents. Seldom, if ever, do they research the impact of love and high expectations.
Since the landmark decision, Brown vs. Topeka in 1954, there has been a 66% decline in African American teachers. Many African American students are in classrooms where they are not loved, liked, or respected. Their culture is not honored and bonding is not considered. They are given low expectations – which helps to explain how students can be promoted from one grade to another without mastery of the content.
There are so many benefits to homeschooling beyond academics. Most schools spend more than 33% of the day disciplining students. And bullying has become a significant issue. One of every 6 Black males is suspended and large numbers are given Ritalin and placed in Special Education. These problems seldom, if ever, exist in the Homeschool environment.
Another major benefit is the summer months. Research shows that there is a 3 year gap between White and Black students. Some students do not read or are involved in any academic endeavor during the summer. Those students lose 36 months or 3 years if you multiply 3 months times 12 years (grades first -12) Homeschool parents do not allow academics to be forsaken for 3 months.
Finally, in the homeschool environment, parents are allowed to teach their children
The Rise Of The A**hole Sports Dad (And How To Avoid Turning Into One)
Children, in general, suck at sports. And as a parent, watching them suck evokes all kinds of emotions—fierce protectiveness, embarrassment, self-loathing (Oh God, I gave them those genes)—which many of us have difficulty handling. My kid played second-grade basketball this winter, and when she failed to make a shot the entire season, it took everything in my power not to storm the court, clear out an area around the basket with police tape, and let her shoot until she got the fucking thing in.
Being a sports parent is a remarkable test of self-restraint. We’re so used to being sports fans and watching pro and college sports played at a high level that it’s jarring to witness children flail as they learn the idea of sports: competing, knowing the rules, positioning yourself to make a play, etc. This is assuming your child even wants to learn. Half the time, my kid stood at midcourt chatting with friends, only to have the ref come up and say, “Hey, guys, you have to actually play now.” And this is before you factor in all the other parents and coaches acting like dicks and raising your blood pressure even more.
That’s when the yelling begins. That’s when you go from silently clapping to breaking the ice with a “Get back on D, son!” to going Full Pitino. That crazy dad next to you, drenching everyone in frothed spittle? He was you once. And if you aren’t careful, you could become him. Here’s how to keep that from happening.
1. Only the coach gets to coach. He (or she) is the one who volunteered his time for the gig. He’s the one who planned the practices and coordinated the schedule and reserved court time at the nearby Sportsthunderplex. He’s the one who drags that big-ass mesh bag filled with balls from his car every weekend. If you’re not willing to make that sacrifice, you don’t get to show up on game day and act like you’re Nick Saban.
2. Don’t get too jealous of that one good kid on the field. Every kiddie game features at least one child who is a genetically superior mutant sent from the future. She can make shots. She plays tight defense. She runs fast. She never gets distracted by shiny whistles. This mini Bron-Bron will NEVER be your kid. Your kid will look like an invalid by comparison, and that is (deep breath) okay. At this level, every sports league is an experiment. Some kids get the hang of it right away. Some kids are late bloomers. And some kids want practice to end so they can go watch Frozen for the sixtieth time. So don’t get discouraged when a ringer comes along. Chances are that kid will burn out and become an alkie by 17, and you’ll have the last laugh!
Creative destruction: A cost crisis, changing labour markets and new technology will turn an old institution on its head
HIGHER education is one of the great successes of the welfare state. What was once the privilege of a few has become a middle-class entitlement, thanks mainly to government support. Some 3.5m Americans and 5m Europeans will graduate this summer. In the emerging world universities are booming: China has added nearly 30m places in 20 years. Yet the business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars.
Now a revolution has begun (see article), thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.
Off campus, online
Higher education suffers from Baumol’s disease—the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity. Whereas the prices of cars, computers and much else have fallen dramatically, universities, protected by public-sector funding and the premium employers place on degrees, have been able to charge ever more for the same service. For two decades the cost of going to college in America has risen by 1.6 percentage points more than inflation every year.
California voters reject tenure, layoff rules for public school teachers
The PACE/USC Rossier School of Education Poll showed that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) agree that the state should do away with “Last In, First Out,” a policy that requires the newest K-12 teachers be laid off first, regardless of merit. Just 17 percent said California should continue to conduct teacher layoffs in order of seniority, according to the poll. PACE stands for Policy Analysis for California Education.
California voters also largely opposed the state’s tenure laws for public school teachers, according to the poll. Six in 10 California voters said teachers should not continue to receive tenure, as it makes firing bad teachers difficult. Twenty-five percent of voters said the state should keep tenure for public school teachers to provide them job protections and the freedom to teach potentially controversial topics without fear of reprisals.
eBooks vs Paper
Choosing books to take on holiday has got more difficult in recent years. Now it is a question not just of what to read but how – on paper, tablet, e-reader, or perhaps even a phone – and people have strong opinions on which is best. But is there any more to the decision than cost and convenience? On this question, the answer suggested by numerous studies into the neuroscience and psychology of reading in different formats is an emphatic yes.
There is no shortage of people warning of the risks attendant on the rise of “screen culture”, as the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield calls it. Greenfield has repeatedly expressed concern that, as technology takes us into unknown territory, “the brain may be adapting in unprecedented ways”. Though she tends to stress that these changes might be good or bad, that hasn’t stopped her more negative speculations being picked up in the media and amplified in far more strident terms.
On the other side of the two cultures divide, the novelist and critic Will Self recently argued that the connectivity of the digital world was fatal for the serious novel, which requires all the reader’s attention. Looking ahead 20 years, he posed a question: “If you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.”
E-reading is certainly on the rise. The Pew Research Center reports that, as recently as 2010, hardly anyone in the US had an e-reader or tablet. Now half do. The proportion of the population who have read an ebook in the past year rose from 17 per cent in 2011 to 28 per cent just three years later. In the UK, figures from Nielsen, which monitors book sales, showed that one in four consumer titles bought in 2013 was an ebook, up from one in five a year earlier.
Surprising Findings on Two-Year vs. Four-Year Degrees Return on Investment Holds Steady at About 15% for Recent Graduates
A college degree is worth it even as the cost of going to school rapidly escalates and real wages decline for graduates, WSJ’s Mark Peters reports on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty
Who earns more, a recent graduate from a flagship state university with a bachelor’s degree or one who finishes a two-year program at a little-known community college?
The answer isn’t so clear.
As states for the first time mine graduates’ salary data from public colleges, they are finding that paychecks for holders of associate degrees in a technical field are outstripping many grads with four-year degrees, at least early in a career.
The growing body of data, from states including Texas, Colorado and Indiana, provides a sober new look at the value of a postsecondary education in a slowly recovering economy.
Overall, the findings reinforce the belief that a college degree is worth the investment. But they highlight the reconsideration of a long-held article of faith that a four-year college degree guarantees at least a middle-class life, while an associate degree is its poor country cousin.
In Indiana, figures show that after a year in the workforce there, a graduate of Ivy Tech Community College makes more on average than a graduate of Indiana University.
The Reality of Student Debt Is Different From the Clichés
The deeply indebted college graduate has become a stock character in the national conversation: the art history major with $50,000 in debt, the underemployed barista with $75,000, the struggling poet with $100,000.
The anecdotes have created the impression that such high levels of student debt are typical. But they’re not. They are outliers, and they’re warping our understanding of bigger economic problems.
In fact, the share of income that young adults are devoting to loan repayment has remained fairly steady over the last two decades, according to data the Brookings Institutions is releasing on Tuesday. Only 7 percent of young-adult households with education debt have $50,000 or more of it. By contrast, 58 percent of such households have less than $10,000 in debt, and an additional 18 percent have between $10,000 and $20,000.
Chess Site Now Accessible to Visually Impaired People
Thanks to recent improvements, it is really easy to start playing chess games through Lichess using screenreader. The first thing you need to do is to press “Enable blind mode” button, which should be one of first elements you encounter on the site. It is not really possible to play games without blind mode turned on.
If blind mode is on, you are offered textual description of moves and you are presented with labelled buttons. Now it is really easy – pick a player or just choose to play against computer and fun begins. During the game there is a heading called “Textual representation” and following this heading are following information:
Why Free Play Is the Best Summer School
Most schools across the nation have marked the end of another academic year, and it’s time for summer. Time for kids to bolt for the schoolhouse doors for two long months of play, to explore their neighborhoods and discover the mysteries, treasures, and dramas they have to offer. This childhood idyll will hold true for some children, but for many kids, the coming of summer signals little more than a seasonal shift from one set of scheduled, adult-supervised lessons and activities to another.
Unscheduled, unsupervised, playtime is one of the most valuable educational opportunities we give our children. It is fertile ground; the place where children strengthen social bonds, build emotional maturity, develop cognitive skills, and shore up their physical health. The value of free play, daydreaming, risk-taking, and independent discovery have been much in the news this year, and a new study by psychologists at the University of Colorado reveals just how important these activities are in the development of children’s executive functioning.
Executive function is a broad term for cognitive skills such as organization, long-term planning, self-regulation, task initiation, and the ability to switch between activities. It is a vital part of school preparedness and has long been accepted as a powerful predictor of academic performance and other positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. The focus of this study is “self-directed executive function,” or the ability to generate personal goals and determine how to achieve them on a practical level. The power of self-direction is an underrated and invaluable skill that allows students to act productively in order to achieve their own goals.
High-School Dropouts and College Grads Are Moving to Very Different Places
The ability to attract skilled workers is a key factor, if not the key factor, in the growth of cities and metro regions. Cities themselves are understandably keen to tout when their populations are growing, but just tracking overall population can mask the underlying trends that will truly shape the future of our metro areas.
A few weeks ago, I looked at the different places both recent immigrants and U.S.-born Americans are moving since the recession began. But, as I noted then, even these big-picture figures tell us little about the educational levels and skills of the people that are moving and staying. Writing in The Atlantic several years ago, I pointed out that the “means migration”—the movement of highly educated and highly skilled people—is a key factor that shapes which cities will thrive and which will struggle.
What the United States has been seeing is, so to speak, a big talent sort. There have been very different patterns of migration by education and skill, with the highly educated and highly skilled going some places and the less educated and less skilled going to others.
In Defense of Laptops in the Classroom
Years later, as a professor, I feel embarrassed by that interaction, and not just because I lost my cool and used the F-word to a U-grad. The laptop is now endemic in the modern classroom, with most students using them—purportedly—to take notes and access course materials. Of course, they’re also (often primarily) used to do anything but classwork: games, Snapchat, shopping—even porn. Thus many professors police the ways students use their laptops, and some are banning them outright. But what good does that do? The Laptop Police just seems like one more way of helicoptering students instead of letting them learn how to be students—indeed, how to be adults.
The case for a laptop-free classroom is indeed strong. Last week on The New Yorker’s website, Dartmouth professor Dan Rockmore wrote that he’s banned laptops for years, explaining that “any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best” for his curriculum. What surprised him, though, was that most of his computer science department agreed. No computers in a CompSci class! But, Rockmore argued, research—such as Cornell’s 2003 landmark study “The Laptop and the Lecture” and recent studies out of UCLA and Princeton—shows over and over that students simply learn better when taking notes in old-fashioned chicken scratches.
To improve our schools, we need to make it harder to become a teacher.
So far this month in education news, a California court has decimated rigid job protections for teachers, and Oklahoma’s governor has abolished the most rigorous learning standards that state has ever had. Back and forth we go in America’s exhausting tug-of-war over schools—local versus federal control, union versus management, us versus them.
But something else is happening, too. Something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education in ways these nasty feuds never will.
In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher. Ever so slowly, these legislators and educators are beginning to treat the preparation of teachers the way we treat the training of surgeons and pilots—rendering it dramatically more selective, practical, and rigorous. All of which could transform not only the quality of teaching in America but the way the rest of us think about school and learning.
Wisconsin took one very small step toward teacher content knowledge, MTEL a few years ago.
Related: the National Council on a Teacher Quality has been reviewing schools of education.
This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition — and it could change everything
École 42 might be one of the most ambitious experiments in engineering education.
It has no teachers. No books. No MOOCs. No dorms, gyms, labs, or student centers. No tuition.
And yet it plans to turn out highly qualified, motivated software engineers, each of whom has gone through an intensive two- to three-year program designed to teach them everything they need to know to become outstanding programmers.
The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech.
He is also irrepressibly upbeat, smiling and laughing almost nonstop for the hour that he led a tour through École 42 earlier this week. (Who wouldn’t be, with that much wealth? Yet I have met much more dour billionaires before.)
Change to our agrarian era $15k+/student public school organizations looms.
Math for seven-year-olds: graph coloring, chromatic numbers, and Eulerian paths and circuits
As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, map coloring and Eulerian paths and circuits. I brought in a pile of sample graphs I had prepared, and all the girls made up their own graphs and maps to challenge each other. By the end each child had compiled a mathematical “coloring book” containing the results of their explorations. Let me tell you a little about what we did.
We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.
The 1 Thing That Will Improve Math Learning
How can we do a better job of teaching kids math? A different curriculum? New pedagogical strategies? Personalized instruction through technology? All these worthy ideas have their adherents, but another method — reducing math anxiety — may both improve performance and help kids enjoy math more. Sian Beilock and I recently reviewed the research literature on math anxiety with an eye towards remediation. Here are some of the highlights.
Math anxiety means, unsurprisingly, that one feels tension and apprehension in situations involving math. What is surprising is the frequency of the problem, and the young age at which it can start. Fully half of first and second graders feel moderate to severe math anxiety. And many children do not outgrow it; about 25 percent of students attending a four-year college suffer from math anxiety. Among community college students, the figure is 80 percent.
Here’s Why the Student Loan Market Is Completely Insane
President Obama made news this week by expanding a student loan program to broaden the eligibility of borrowers and proposing to limit monthly payments to 10 percent of a student borrower’s income. On the margin, such moves might help. But the administration’s efforts don’t address a more fundamental problem: These loans aren’t calibrated for risk. In other words, students from Harvard and less-prestigious regional colleges are thrown in the same bucket, despite quite different risk profiles.
Under Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rules governing the insurance of banks, lenders can’t differentiate among schools in assessing credit risk as they do with home buyers and car owners. As a result, “the government has made it difficult for banks to price to default rates,” says Mike Cagney, founder of Social Finance, a socially based student lending operation known informally as SoFi. “By accepting FDIC insurance, banks lose pricing flexibility and can’t charge interest rates commensurate with the quality of schools—and default rates vary widely by schools.”
SoFi has funded more than $650 million in loans to 7,000 borrowers since its founding in 2011. Says Cagney: “The definition of a predatory lender is someone who pushes loans on an individual who can’t afford to pay them back. Under that definition, many of the educational loans made today could be considered predatory.”
Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites
We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.
Via Laura Waters.
Sports Should Be Child’s Play
The heightened pressure on child athletes to be, essentially, adult athletes has fostered an epidemic of hyperspecialization that is both dangerous and counterproductive.
One New York City soccer club proudly advertises its development pipeline for kids under age 6, known as U6. The coach-picked stars, “poised for elite level soccer,” graduate to the U7 “pre-travel” program. Parents, visions of scholarships dancing in their heads, enable this by paying for private coaching and year-round travel.
Autism costs ‘£32bn per year’ in UK
The economic cost of supporting someone with autism over a lifetime is much higher than previously thought, research suggests.
It amounts to £1.5m in the UK and $2.4m in the US for individuals with the highest needs, say UK and US experts.
Autism cost the UK more than heart disease, stroke and cancer combined, said an autism charity.
But only £6.60 per person is spent on autism research compared with £295 on cancer, according to Autistica.
The research looked at the costs to society of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in both the UK and US.
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on Special Education spending (2007).
A speech for high school graduates
Last weekend I gave a speech at this year’s graduation event for the Stanford Online High School (OHS) that one of my children has been attending. Here’s the transcript:
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this celebration today—and congratulations to this year’s OHS graduates.You know, as it happens, I myself never officially graduated from high school, and this is actually the first high school graduation I’ve ever been to.
It’s been fun over the past three years—from a suitable parental distance of course—to see my daughter’s experiences at OHS. One day I’m sure everyone will know about online high schools—but you’ll be able to say, “Yes, I was there when that way of doing such-and-such a thing was first invented—at OHS.”
The Future Of College Financial Aid, According To The Man Who Influences Billions Of It
With college costs continuing to rise and the US economy still sputtering, financial aid for college is more important than ever to families trying to foot the bill. The big question then is what is the future of college financial aid? For that answer I turned to the man at the top, Justin Draeger, the President of the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). The nation’s college aid professionals make up NASFAA’s membership, allowing Draeger to keep his finger on the pulse of what is going on with billions in college aid. Ahead of NASFAA’s annual conference later this month in Nashville, Mr. Draeger took time for the Q&A below.
1. Admissions Deans offer admission to more students than they have room for because they know that not all of those students will enroll. For the same reason, financial aid officers award millions more in aid than is actually budgeted. How do admissions and financial aid professionals collaborate to fill a college’s seats without breaking the financial aid bank?
Generally, the planned collaboration between admission and financial aid offices occurs through an institution’s enrollment management plan and/or policies. This is typically derived from intricate statistical analyses that calculate the probability of students choosing to attend, the students’ expected financial need, and the institutional financial aid dollars available at the school.
Mining Student Results & Metadata: “massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning”
Recently, we celebrated Knewton’s sixth birthday. It seems that each year brings more progress and change than all the previous years combined, and this past year was no different.
We’re using our latest round of funding ($51 million) to continue to extend our technological leadership and support rapid growth globally, including a new office across the pond in London. Our partnerships with leading education companies brought Knewton-powered products to over 4 million students in 250,000 classrooms in 120 countries around the globe. We expect to have over 7 million students using products powered by the Knewton platform by the end of this year.
I joined Knewton back in 2010. The company was still getting off the ground, but the vision was the same as it is today — to provide personalized learning for everyone on the planet. Every individual deserves the opportunity to maximize their learning potential. It’s inspiring to see how far we’ve come, and to go to work every day knowing that we’re helping to make education more effective and accessible for students worldwide.
In the past year, we’ve seen a massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning, both in the U.S. and internationally. While it was always Knewton’s vision to create an adaptive learning platform to benefit every student in the world, it wasn’t always straightforward for education companies and others to understand this mission. Now, these organizations are using our platform to push the envelope to create products that will have a meaningful impact on student outcomes. Knewton enables our partners to focus on innovating new content and user experiences — while leveraging Knewton’s infrastructure and network effects to provide powerful personalization for students and actionable metrics for instructors.
Polarizing Plutocracy: Our Broken Higher Education System
The American political system is broken, and one unmistakable sign of it is our inability to bring down soaring levels of student debt or to regulate predatory for-profit colleges. The best solution the Obama administration has been able to propose in this area is a college ratings system that would evaluate colleges on the basis of factors like graduation rates and graduates’ earnings and debt loads.
Frankly, the idea that a ratings system will fix what ails American higher education is a little nuts. It views education as if it were a market like any other, and treats colleges like consumer products. “It’s like rating a blender,” burbled Education Department official Jamienne Studley last week to the New York Times. But while blenders can be tested in a lab, employment statistics can be all too easy to game, as anyone who’s followed recent reporting about bogus law school employment rates can attest.
By taking an approach to regulation that emphasizes “transparency” of information, the Obama administration also places the burden of evaluating schools on students and their families. Less affluent students, who often are poorly advised during the college application process in general, won’t fare particularly well under this system. A more aggressive approach is needed to protect them from the predatory for-profits. For many in this group, far more generous financial aid is needed to make going to college an economically rational decision in the first place.
The Key to Better US News College Rankings
What would it take for a well-regarded institution — such as the University of Rochester, and a few dozen more like it — to be among U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 national universities? Hundreds of millions of dollars and a prayer, according a new peer-reviewed paper co-written by a former Rochester provost and his staff.
The study, published by the journal Research in Higher Education, argues that small movements in the rankings are simply “noise” and that any kind of sustained upward movement is both immensely expensive and nearly impossible.
Ralph Kuncl, a former Rochester provost who is now president of University of Redlands, in California, co-wrote the paper, which was a decade in the making. He started thinking about changes in the rankings when he was vice provost at Johns Hopkins University.
He said “the trustees would go bananas” when Johns Hopkins dropped in the rankings. The administration would then have to explain what had happened.
Parents fight student data mining (do they use google & Facebook?)
Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.
A months-long review by POLITICO of student privacy issues, including dozens of interviews, found the parent privacy lobby gaining momentum — and catching big-data advocates off guard. Initially dismissed as a fringe campaign, the privacy movement has attracted powerful allies on both the left and right. The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for more student privacy protection. So is the American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization of conservative legislators.
When No One Is Safe From Measles
Chalk up another demerit for the antivaccine movement: So far, 2014 is shaping up as the worst year for confirmed cases of the measles since it was declared eliminated as an endemic disease in 2000 in the U.S.
Most of the news and media coverage of the outbreak has focused on the fact that 69 percent of the 288 people sickened so far hadn’t been vaccinated against measles.
This, of course, shouldn’t be a surprise. People who don’t get immunized are prone to getting sick. What’s more noteworthy is that 10 percent of those who’ve fallen ill had been vaccinated and another 20 percent may have been but weren’t sure. Given that almost all the cases originated with unvaccinated individuals, this means vaccine rejecters are spreading a preventable disease not only to their own families but to the rest of the population as well.
Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing
May 2014 A Pioneer Institute White Paper by Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins New technology allows advocates for education as workforce development to accomplish what has long been out of their reach: the collection of data on every child, beginning with preschool or even earlier, and using that data to track the child throughout his/her academic career and his/her progression through the workforce. This paper explores the many initiatives that the federal government has worked with private entities to design and encourage states to participate in, in order to increase the collection and sharing of student data, while relaxing privacy protections. The authors offer recommendations to protect student privacy, including urging parents to ask what kinds of information are being collected on digital-learning platforms and whether the software will record data about their children’s behaviors and attitudes rather than just academic knowledge. If parents object to such data-collection, they should opt out. The authors also urge state lawmakers to pass student privacy laws, and they recommend that Congress correct the 2013 relaxation of FERPA.
A Decade of Degrees Universities are constantly changing and Northwestern is no exception. Its history—old and new—is written in the creation, destruction, and changing popularity of its majors.
Had your great-great-great-grandfather, or thereabouts, bought a $100 “perpetual scholarship” when the University first opened its doors on November 5, 1855, he would have had five departments and two degrees to pick from. Today, not only do you have the ability to attend NU and not be a Methodist man, but you also have 94 different majors to pick from, according to CAESAR.
The path from the University of 1855 to today is filled with antiquated majors and abandoned programs. For instance, in the years following World War I, the University introduced “Military Science” and “Physical Education and Hygiene” to broaden its course offerings, though both programs have since been abandoned. Those programs didn’t get very long in the spotlight: To be prepared for wartime jobs during World War II, more Northwestern students studied math, physics and chemistry.
The period after the war saw a huge change in Northwestern’s curriculum. New majors in “Naval Science” and “Home Economics” were created, presumably on the basis of the idea that sailing and sewing were vital anti-Soviet trades. In light of the struggle against communism, classes in “Western Civilization” to teach “democratic values” grew in popularity. This was accompanied by a renewed emphasis on the sciences to keep Moscow from beating us to the moon. The ’70s brought new technology and new fields of study: In 1971, the Department of Computer Science was created, closely followed in 1972, by the African-American Studies department.
The Declining Fortunes of the Young since 2000
Beaudry, Paul, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand:
We document that successive cohorts of college and post-college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s. However, this pattern reversed for cohorts entering after 2000; profiles of the proportion of a cohort in cognitive occupations since school completion fall and become flatter with successive cohorts. Since cohort-wage profiles display a similar pattern, these findings appear to fit with a strong increase in demand for cognitive tasks in the 1990s followed by a decline in the 2000s.
Tyler Cowen includes a few more links.
Two educators, two very different visions, one question
Take two education activists with very different theories — and give them a chance to work together on a goal they both care about. That’s the thinking in the video above, the kick-off of Microsoft’s new Work Wonders project, which pairs up unlikely collaborators to spark new ideas. Watch as TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra joins forces with TEDx speaker Adam Braun to tackle a bold mission: Use technology to rethink education in severely underserved communities.
They’re a bit of an odd couple. Mitra, who created the School in the Cloud to enable kids to explore questions that matter to them on their own, believes that traditional schools are becoming more and more obsolete; meanwhile Braun, who founded Pencils of Promise to rally communities in the developing world to build schools, believes that traditional classrooms are the answer to opening up opportunity.
Above, watch the first in a series of mini-docs following this collaboration as it unfolded over the past three months. This episode shows Mitra and Braun meeting for the first time and thinking about how the other’s talents could help strengthen their own vision.
Microsoft, a longtime TED partner, will be revealing more episodes over the next month, so you can join the pair as they explore how to adapt Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) tools for use in three Pencils of Promise schools in Ghana, with the help of Office 365 products and services, and how to build a SOLE starter kit to roll out across Pencils of Promise’s global network. This kit, designed with the needs of underserved communities in mind, could even get distribution far beyond that.
Olin College Commencement Speech
Good afternoon. Today is a very special day for those of you graduating and your parents but it is also a special day for the world.
Here at Olin you have had a unique kind of educational experience – one that I wish more graduating seniors had had from our colleges and universities across the globe and certainly one that I personally wish I had had.
Yes, I went to Brown University – also a great school – but I was trained to be just a technical geek – worshiping technical problems that could be solved with mathematics, physics and computation.
Problems were like clocks; we viewed them as mechanisms that we could take apart, analyze, and solve through aggregating partial solutions. All problems were seen as technical in nature, isolated from the contexts that made them messier to work on.
But you are different – you have learned that many significant problems are, at their root, socio-technical. And that the problem, as stated, is almost never the real problem. You have learned how to unpack the problem as it is integrally associated with the context in which it is embedded.
You see the problem from many angles – the social, the cultural and the institutional as well as just the technical.
In design parlance you have learned to unpack and extend the brief – a talent you will find critical for all things as you venture forth from here today.
I did not have the luxury of your education but experiences quickly taught me the importance of looking beyond the problem as stated – to follow the problem out into its situated context and let it take you to its roots.
Roll Call: The importance of teacher attendance
National Council on Teacher Quality:
This report breaks down teacher attendance for 40 districts in the nation’s largest cities in the 2012-2013 school year. We identify districts with the greatest percentage of teachers with excellent attendance as well as those with the biggest percentages of chronically absent teachers. In addition to identifying districts that are leaders and laggards in school attendance, the report takes a look at the impact of school poverty levels on teacher attendance and whether or not policies to curb absences made a difference.
Dads on patrol provide positive example in classrooms
Usually when we think about the parent heading to a PTO meeting, our minds go to moms, but a program in Sun Prarie schools is trying to change that.
They’re called WatchDOGS, DOGS standing for “Dads Of Great Students.”
Every morning at Horizon Elementary School, Principal Rainey Briggs introduces the men who came in for the day to look after the halls and participate in classrooms to the entire student body.
Briggs said the program has grown to be so popular that they had to add days when dads come in.
“It gives us another set of eyes in the building. It gives us another person in the classroom who really wants to be that positive role model for kids from a male’s perspective,” Briggs said.
Little brother, if I had to go to college again
My brother recently moved away from home to begin his first semester of college. I thought about my first semester of college and how much I changed during those four years. As I put myself in his shoes I thought to myself – what would I do differently if I had to go through college one more time? What would I do the same?
So a few weeks ago I sat down and wrote an email for him. I didn’t write it in an attempt to push him towards a different path. I wrote it because I think I would want him to do the same if he’d finished college before me. Here you go.
Start a business
Take something you’re good at, working out, and turn it into a business on the side. Be a physical trainer for people during your free time. Thanks to your classes, your days will be predictable and scheduling sessions will be easy. If there’s one thing [name redacted] and I both regret looking back, it’s not taking advantage of the freedom and free time you have in college.
OLPC Memo 5: Education and Psychology
What goals do we want our schools to achieve? Most parents agree that their children should learn about History, Language, Science and Math, and get some instruction in Health, Sports, and Art. Most parents also want their children taught to behave in what they regard to be civilized ways. And surely, most parents would also agree that schools should help children learn good ways to think. However, while schools have good ways to teach facts about subjects, many pupils still fail to build adequate skills for applying that knowledge. [[1]]
But if “good thinking” is one of our principal goals, then why don’t schools try to explicitly teach about how human Learning and Reasoning work? Instead we tacitly assume that if we simply provide enough knowledge, then each child’s brain will ‘self-organize’ appropriate ways to apply those facts. Then would it make sense for us to include a subject called “Human Psychology” as part of the grade-school curriculum? I don’t think that we can do this yet, because, few present-day teachers would agree about which “Theories of Thinking” to teach.
So instead, we’ll propose a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! The rest of this essay will suggest some benefits that could come from this, and some practical ways to accomplish it—by engaging children in various kinds of constructive, computer-related projects.
5 facts about today’s college graduates
1 Only about 56% of students earn degrees within six years. The National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit verification and research organization, tracked 2.4 million first-time college students who enrolled in fall 2007 with the intent of pursuing a degree or certificate. The completion rate was highest (72.9%) among students who started at four-year, private, nonprofit schools, and lowest (39.9%) among those who started at two-year public institutions.
2 Business is still the most common major. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about a fifth (20.5%) of the 1.79 million bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2011-12 were in business. Business has been the single most common major since 1980-81; before that, education led the way. The least common bachelor’s degrees, according to the NCES, were in library science (95 conferred in 2011-12), military technologies and applied sciences (86) and precision production (37).
New Orleans Public Schools go 100% Charter
The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old work sheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good.
Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans’ Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.
With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.
Locally, Madison continues with its agrarian era school structure, unchallenged.
Is Harvard really better than Yale? This startup may have the answer
When American high school students—and foreign students keen on studying in the US—survey their choice of universities, they can consult one of any number of rankings and listings. Or they can trudge through the websites of dozens on colleges to make up their own minds. Either way, it’s a bit of a chore.
The website Onlyboth.com seeks to may make that process easier with a program that crawls through the thicket of available data and pulls out useful insights and comparisons. The startup’s co-founders, Raul Valdez-Perez, formerly a research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, and his colleague Andre Lessa, collected data from several sources, chiefly the federal government, to create a database of each US university’s special characteristics. Type in a college name, and the website shows how it compares to its neighbors and peers, as well across lists.
MOOCs’ disruption is only beginning
Clayton M. Christensen and Michelle R. Weise:
JOURNALISTS, AS 2013 ended, were busy declaring the death of MOOCs, more formally known as massive open online courses. Silicon Valley startup Udacity, one of the first to offer the free Web-based college classes, had just announced its pivot to vocational training — a sure sign to some that this much-hyped revolution in higher education had failed. The collective sigh of relief from more traditional colleges and universities was audible.
The news, however, must have also had the companies that had enthusiastically jumped on the MOOC train feeling a bit like Mark Twain. When newspapers confused Twain for his ailing cousin, the writer famously quipped, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Undoubtedly pronouncements over MOOCs’ demise are likewise premature. And their potential to disrupt — on price, technology, even pedagogy — in a long-stagnant industry is only just beginning to be seen.
How important is disruption in higher education? Tuition costs have been ballooning faster than general inflation and even faster than health care. And what do we get in return? Nearly half of all bachelor’s-degree holders do not find employment or are underemployed upon graduation. At the same time, employers have not been satisfied with degree candidates. Two recent Gallup polls showed that although 96 percent of chief academic officers believe they’re doing a good job of preparing students for employment, only 11 percent of business leaders agree that graduates have the requisite skills for success in the workforce. And this is all occurring while higher education leaders were convinced that they were innovating all along.
Is College Worth It? It Depends on Whether You Graduate
In The New York Times on Tuesday morning, David Leonhardt took on the “Is college worth it?” question. His answer? An unequivocal yes. The college wage premium — how much more college grads earn than everyone else — is the widest it’s ever been, Leonhardt wrote. Graduates are much more likely to find jobs than nongraduates. And despite mounting fears about student debt levels, the average student’s loan burden pales in comparison to the long-term benefits of a bachelor’s degree.
“For all the struggles that many young college graduates face,” Leonhardt wrote, “a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.”
That’s probably true. Sure, some people end up with unmanageable debt loads, and not everyone who earns a bachelor’s degree easily gets a job, let alone a good one (all points that Leonhardt acknowledges). But on average, college graduates are much better off than nongraduates.
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you’ve never heard of, or whose sense you’re unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you already know.
Indeed, if you look up those particular words in the dictionary that comes with your computer — on my Mac, it’s the New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd Edition — you’ll be rewarded with… well, there won’t be any reward. The entries are pedestrian:
example /igˈzampəl/, n. a thing characteristic of its kind or illustrating a general rule.
How a college with 340 students lost $220 million in five years
The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, with its sleek, glass-walled buildings around a peaceful grass oval, has earned glowing international attention for the successful ways it has pioneered the teaching of undergraduate engineering.
Built from scratch with hundreds of millions of dollars from a private foundation and a commitment to charging no tuition, 12-year-old Olin has attracted standout faculty, even though it does not give tenure. Top companies recruit its high-achieving students, who graduate at enviable rates into jobs with above-average starting salaries.
Behind the accolades, however, Olin has been bleeding red ink.
Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It
With tuition costs more than doubling over the past generation, and student debt now exceeding $1 trillion, everyone knows the cost of college is too damn high. About 40 million people nationwide are weighed down by education debts that often reach into the tens of thousands. But those numbers are just a sliver of the bleak shadow that Wall Street casts over higher education.
A new study on debt across the higher education system reveals that the massive debts borne by both students and their institutions has climbed to about $45 billion per year. So the debt-related payments to the financial sector—including Wall Street investors, institutional lenders and the mammoth federal student loan system—drive about one tenth of all spending on higher education nationwide. These debt-servicing costs are tied to tuition lending as well as financial debts accrued by schools themselves, which finance investments of all kinds, from professors’ salaries to libraries to indulgences like sports teams and administrators’ bonuses.
According to researchers with University of California–Berkeley’s Debt & Society Project, a project of the Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics with research support from the American Federation of Teachers, the a key factor in the rising cost of college is driven by expenditures largely unrelated to either the quality of the education, teaching or maintaining campus facilities. Rather, college is getting unimaginably expensive for both institutions and students because it costs so much to finance the business of education, thanks to Wall Street lenders. While there are many controversial budget items in higher education—critics lament bloated administrations and the cost of sports teams and flashy amenities—the report focuses on debt itself, and the massive volume of borrowing, as a major overlooked burden on institutions.
A College Degree is No Guarantee
The Great Recession has been hard on all recent college graduates, but it has been even harder on black recent graduates.
This report reviews evidence on the labor-market experience of black recent college graduates during and after the Great Recession.
Key findings include:
In 2013 (the most recent full year of data available), 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent.
Between 2007 (immediately before the Great Recession) and 2013, the unemployment rate for black recent college graduates nearly tripled (up 7.8 percentage points from 4.6 percent in 2007).
In 2013, more than half (55.9 percent) of employed black recent college graduates were “underemployed” –defined as working in an occupation that typically does not require a four-year college degree. Even before the Great Recession, almost half of black recent graduates were underemployed (45.0 percent in 2007).
Black recent college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors have fared somewhat better, but still suffer from high unemployment and underemployment rates. For example, for the years 2010 to 2012, among black recent graduates with degrees in engineering, the average unemployment rate was 10 percent and the underemployment rate was 32 percent.
In part, these outcomes reflect the disproportionate negative effect of economic downturns on young workers and, in part, they reflect ongoing racial discrimination in the labor market. A college degree blunts both these effects relative to young black workers without a degree, but college is not a guarantee against either set of forces.
The Ripple Effects of Rising Student Debt
What are the roads not taken because students must take out loans for college? A collection of studies shows that the burden of student debt may well cause people to make different decisions than they would otherwise — affecting not just individual lives but also the entire economy.
For one thing, it appears that people with student loans are less likely to start businesses of their own. A new study has found that areas with higher relative growth in student debt show lower growth in the formation of small businesses (in this case, firms with one to four employees).
The correlation makes sense. People normally have only a certain amount of “debt capacity,” said Brent W. Ambrose, a professor of risk management at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of a preliminary paper on the research along with Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
From The Ivy League To State Schools, Demand For Computer Science Is Booming
For years, people in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the United States to become interested in studying computer science. It now looks like they’ve finally gotten the message.
Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and Stanford Computer Science professor Eric Roberts.
At Lazowska’s own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring — the graph below, published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself:
Educating the educators University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is dedicated to helping schools and families determine which new educational tools and strategies are scientifically supported and worth adopting
There are myriad books and professional development materials devoted to the study of learning styles. The problem, says University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is that most of them don’t rely on good science.
“If you talk to teachers frequently, they’re surprised there isn’t a firm research base for different learning styles,” says Willingham, author of the books “When Can You Trust the Experts?” and “Why Don’t Students Like School?”
That lack of good information is among the reasons Willingham has devoted his work to researching the application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education — and popularizing the information for the general public. In addition to providing commentary about science and education on the education blog RealClearEducation.com, he is working to help schools and families determine which educational approaches — from games and software to training programs and workbooks — are scientifically supported and worth adopting.
Willingham spoke with the Monitor about the importance of offering students a challenging curriculum and providing motivation and praise to help struggling students.
What are some of the other unfounded beliefs teachers have about what works in the classroom?
One example is so-called neuromyths, or beliefs that some educators may have about the brain. For example, the characterization of left-brain versus right-brain thinking is not well-supported and really never has been.
The truth is that most teachers in my experience really have a lot of common sense. There are ideas that are peddled to them that are wrong, but most teachers are pretty skeptical of them. They’re in the classroom every day, so they have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work with kids.
How Education Drives Inequality Among the 99%
Recent hand-wringing about income inequality has focused on the gap between the top 1% and everyone else. A new paper argues that the more telling inequities exist among the 99%, primarily driven by education.
“The single-minded focus on the top 1% can be counterproductive given that the changes to the other 99% have been more economically significant,” says David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and author of the study.
His paper, “Skills, Education and the Rise of Earnings Inequality Among the ‘Other 99 Percent’,” comes as something of riposte to French economist Thomas Piketty, whose bestselling “Capital in the 21st Century” has ignited sales and conversation around the world with its historical look at the fortunes of the top 1%.
Why do people persist in believing things that just aren’t true
Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds.
The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked. The first leaflet—focussed on a lack of evidence connecting vaccines and autism—seemed to reduce misperceptions about the link, but it did nothing to affect intentions to vaccinate. It even decreased intent among parents who held the most negative attitudes toward vaccines, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect. The other two interventions fared even worse: the images of sick children increased the belief that vaccines cause autism, while the dramatic narrative somehow managed to increase beliefs about the dangers of vaccines. “It’s depressing,” Nyhan said. “We were definitely depressed,” he repeated, after a pause.
The Class of 2014 Just Made History in the Worst Imaginable Way
The news: Congratulations, class of 2014!
Not for graduating — though that’s nice, too — but for earning one of the more dubious distinctions in recent memory: You’ve officially been named “the most indebted class ever.”
According to the Wall Street Journal and data compiled by analyst Mark Kantrowitz, the average loan-holding 2014 college graduate will have to pay back $33,000. That’s up from around $31,000 in 2013 and under $10,000 in 1993:
A Math App That Offers an Unusual Human Touch
Tabtor is an expensive iPad math-teaching app for kindergartners through sixth graders. Although free to download and try for two weeks, thereafter it costs $50 a month per child.
At first glance, Tabtor — the name is “tablet tutor” mashed together — does not look particularly different from the hundreds of other math offerings in Apple’s app store and the gazillion math-drill software programs on personal computers.
For each problem, there is space on the touch screen to scribble calculations with a finger or a stylus before punching in the answer on an on-screen keypad. A green check mark and a pleasing clanging sword sound greet a correct answer; a wrong one gets a red “X” and a less pleasing clang. There is a second chance to get the problem right.
So what does the $50 a month buy? Unlike any other math teaching app I’ve encountered, it comes with a human being.
Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?
I’m not that old, and I’ve already seen a lot of proposals for solving “poverty” come and go. Many—think Head Start—are tied up in education. The current debate around education tends to run in two directions: one group wants to improve parenting, or ameliorate poverty, or something along those lines, having seen innumerable correlative studies demonstrating that rich kids on average do better than poor kids at school. The other group—the one I belong to—tends to think that we could do a lot for schools, and especially big urban schools, through some combination of charters, vouchers, and/or weakening the power of teachers’s unions. For more on why the latter group thinks as we do, see the many links in this post.
This has a lot to do with education because, as I noted in the first paragraph, people who are relatively okay with the educational status quo tend to want to address things outside of school first. Diane Ravitch is a great leader for this group. I’ve read two of Ravitch’s books on education—Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education—and to read her work is to respect her knowledge and erudition. She moved from a strong educational reformer who favored charter schools to someone who… I don’t know how to characterize her current position other than to say she doesn’t favor charters or vouchers. She does observe the many ways particular charter schools haven’t done very well, but in my view they haven’t been worse than the urban schools they competed with, and some have done much better.
Overall, Ravitch wants to reduce poverty, but as noted above I’m skeptical of social or government forces to do so. In Reign of Error, her most recent book—I’m not all the way through it—she says that public schools are better than they’re commonly depicted. She’s somewhat right: relatively wealthy suburban schools are okay. But that pretty much leaves urban schools (L.A., Chicago, New York, Newark) to languish, and those are the areas and schools that are most promising for vouchers.
The final thing I’ll note is that a lot of people favor “more” money for schools. Overall, inflation-adjusted funding has roughly doubled on a per-pupil basis, per the New Yorker article, and overall funding is quite high—including in screwed up districts like Washington D.C.’s. The Great Stagnation also discusses this dynamic. So while “more” money for school districts may or may not be a good thing, it’s apparent that more money does not automatically lead to better results.
A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence
One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin.
In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, constructed by one of the students out of brightly colored plastic pieces. (Right.) On the hour, a little white ball would roll down a chute, tripping levers to ring a small chime. Upstairs in one of the science rooms was a 3-D printer, a rough-and-ready contraption that, with a little more luck, is approaching the final stages of actually printing something. Another of the students, a senior, had made it himself. I recognized several other students whom I had seen performing in an after-school stage production, one dressed as Eco-Man in blue and green tights, cape, and mask.
MSMS is a public boarding school in Columbus, occupying a few of the more modest buildings on the grounds of the elegant Mississippi University for Women, is called “The W”. The men who have enrolled at The W since it became co-ed, say they always have a time explaining themselves to those not in the know.
Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities with Highest Paid Administrators
At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group.
The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.
The co-authors, Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood, found that administrative expenditures at the highest-paying universities outpaced spending on scholarships by more than two to one. And while adjunct faculty members became more numerous at the 25 universities, the share of permanent faculty declined drastically.
Children of parents in technical jobs at higher risk for autism
Children of fathers who are in technical occupations are more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
The findings will be presented Friday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta.
During participation in the LoneStar LEND program, first author Aisha S. Dickerson, Ph.D., a researcher at UTHealth’s Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, used the United States government’s Standard Occupational Classification system. Parents were divided into those who had more non-people-oriented jobs (technical) or more people-oriented jobs (non-technical).
Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum.
On Education Reform: Spending & Structure
The law school reform movement gets a boost from an unexpected source:
It is no mystery what has prompted the current calls for a two-year law degree. It is, quite simply, the constantly increasing cost of legal education . . . If I may advert to my own experience at Harvard, once again: In the year I graduated, tuition at Harvard was $1,000. To describe developments since then, in the words of a recent article:
Over the past 60 years, tuition at Harvard Law School has increased ten-fold in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. In the early 1950s, a year’s tuition at the school cost approximately $5,100 in 2011 dollars. Over the next two decades this figure more than doubled, so that by 1971 tuition was $11,664 in 2011 dollars. Tuition grew at a (relatively) modest pace over the course of the 1970s, so that by 1981 it was $14,476 in 2011 dollars. Then it climbed rapidly again, rising to $25,698 in 1991, $34,484 in 2001, and nearly $50,000 in 2011, again all in constant dollars.
What’s Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph
In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor’s degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades?
A few notes:
The persistence of business. Business majors, which include accounting, marketing, operations and real estate, grew even more popular over the past several decades. One in 5 college grads now gets a degree in the field.
The decline of the education major. The education degree saw a dramatic decline, falling from 21 percent of all graduates in 1970 to just 6 percent in 2011. Does this mean there’s a huge shortage of teachers? Not necessarily — it just means that far fewer students who go on to be teachers actually graduate with an education degree. According to the Department of Education, as recently as 1999 roughly two-thirds of new teachers graduated with an undergraduate degree in education. By 2009, that figure fell to just half.
Student Perspectives on Race and Education in Tuscaloosa
“Skin color doesn’t define your intelligence.”
“I am not what society thinks.”
“Looking forward, not to the past.”
These are just a few of the six-word essays written by high school students in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when asked to describe their perspectives on race and education in America today.
The essays are all the more poignant when paired with photographs by the same students documenting everyday life at two schools on very different sides of the resegregation equation. Sixty years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed official segregation, nearly one in three black students in Tuscaloosa now attends a school more reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.
When my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones set out to report the story of the dismantling of court orders, closed-room deals and school district decisions that paved the way for resegregation in Tuscaloosa, she knew some of the most important voices would be from students living the consequences of those decisions. So we hatched a plan to enlist them in telling their own stories. As the engagement editor at ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom, my job is to help build an audience for our work and get the community to participate in our journalism. We wanted the students’ stories to be a vital part of this story from the start.
Intervention with low achieving students: who gets to graduate?
For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.
Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage mothers. She married her high-school boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company. Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-year college degree.
There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were checking off the first item.
Five months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that U.T. was hard. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. “I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”
Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries
ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to be put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall, is among the first efforts to gauge the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. in children below age 4. Doctors at the Georgia Mental Health Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the data was presented, as well as several outside experts strongly criticized the use of medication in so many children that young.
Congratulations to Class of 2014, the Most Indebted Ever
As college graduates in the Class of 2014 prepare to shift their tassels and accept their diplomas, they leave school with one discouraging distinction: they’re the most indebted class ever.
The average Class of 2014 graduate with student-loan debt has to pay back some $33,000, according to an analysis of government data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher at student-marketing company Edvisors. Even after adjusting for inflation that’s nearly double the amount borrowers had to pay back 20 years ago.
UCLA prof says stats prove school’s admissions illegally favor blacks
Public universities in California are barred from using race as a factor in admitting students, but a UCLA professor who once served on its admissions oversight team says he has proof they do it anyway.
While the first round of admissions consideration is handled fairly, African-American students are nearly three times as likely to make it out of the “maybe” pile than equally-qualified white students, and more than twice as likely as Asians, according to Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at the school and author of a new book titled, “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.”
“UCLA is using racial preferences in admissions,” Groseclose, who made his case using data from 2006-2009, told FoxNews.com.
After a first look results in most applications being either accepted or rejected, a handful of senior university staff sift through those marked for further consideration, according to Groseclose. That’s where the alleged bias happens. He found black applicants were accepted at a 43 percent rate in the second round, while whites were accepted at a 15 percent rate and Asians at an 18 percent rate.
Common App: Admissions Collusion?
Colleges may soon have a new reason — an antitrust lawsuit — to think twice about their relationship with the Common Application.
CollegeNET, which provides a variety of admissions-related services to college, some in direct competition with the Common Application, sued Common App last week in federal court, charging antitrust violations. And while the suit is only against Common App, it states that some of the 500 colleges that are members have been “co-conspirators” in some of the alleged violations.
When CollegeNET issued a news release last week about having sued Common Application, some admissions leaders were scratching their heads about how a service to process applications could violate antitrust law. The press release provided few details.
Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.
Confessions of a Grade Inflator Between the grubbing and the blubbering, grading fairly is just not worth the fight.
n the classroom, I can be formidable: I’ve been known to drill-sergeant lethargic students out of their chairs and demand burpees; I am a master of the I’m Not Mad, I’m Just Disappointed scowl. And yet, when it comes to assigning an end-of-semester letter value to their results, I am a grade-A milquetoast. It’s grading time once again, and I’m a softie as usual: Of my current 33 students, 20 are getting either A’s or A-minuses.
It’s not that I just “give” students good grades. Each course I teach has a meticulous assessment breakdown, taking into account participation, homework, quizzes, and essays—and for the latter, I grade with a rubric, which both minimizes griping and allows me to be slightly fair. But even with all of these “hard-ass” measures, the ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in my class, you have to be a total screw-up. I’m still strict with my scale—it’s just that said scale now goes from “great” to “awesome.” It’s pathetic, I know. But when you see what professors today are up against, maybe you’ll understand.
If I graded truly fairly—as in, a C means actual average work—the “customers” would do their level best to ruin my life. Granted, there exist professors whose will to power out-powers grade-gripers. There are stalwarts who remain impervious to students’ tenacious complaints, which can be so single-minded that one wonders what would happen if they had applied one-fifteenth of that focus to their coursework. I admire and cherish those professors, but I am not one of them. You know why? Because otherwise, at the end of every semester, my life would become a 24-hour brigade of this:
How Teacher Quality Became a top Tier Issue
A decade ago, Joyce decided to fund research and advocacy on the importance of placing a highly effective teacher in each classroom, the best ways to identify and reward excellent teachers, and ways to support those who need additional help improving their work.
Coinciding with our ten-year focus on teacher quality, Bellwether has released Genuine Progress, Great Challenges, a report that documents how the teacher quality movement took hold and propelled policy changes in dozens of states. Along with the report, the interactive narrative above tells the story of progress to date and priorities ahead.
In the next ten years to implement and improve upon the policies we know work best for students and teachers. Children need this. Parents demand this. Teachers deserve this.
The DOJ and Wisconsin’s private-school choice program: a storm is brewing
Last week, the Wisconsin Reporter reported that the United States Department of Justice is still conducting an “ongoing investigation” into whether Wisconsin’s private-school choice program discriminates against children with disabilities and, as a result, violates federal disability law.
In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing the Wisconsin school-choice program—as well as two private schools in the program—of discriminating against children with disabilities. In April 2013, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department sent a letter and legal memo to the state of Wisconsin accusing the school-choice program of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). They concluded that unless Wisconsin drastically changes its choice program, the United States will take legal action.
Among its numerous demands, the Justice Department wants private choice schools to be forced to adjust their programming to accommodate all children with disabilities, so long as the accommodation does not “fundamentally alter” the school (an extremely onerous legal standard). Federal disability law, as traditionally interpreted by the U.S. Department of Education, applies a different, less exacting standard to private schools in the choice program. Private schools must only make “minor adjustments” to accommodate students with disabilities. Given that private schools do not receive the same government funding for special education as public schools and may wish to take distinctive approaches to students with behavioral problems, this is perfectly appropriate.
Via Alan Borsuk.
Much more on vouchers, here.
Illinois: Different standards for different students
Under a dramatic new approach to rating public schools, Illinois students of different backgrounds no longer will be held to the same standards — with Latinos and blacks, low-income children and other groups having lower targets than whites for passing state exams, the Tribune has found.
In reading, for example, 85 percent of white third- through eighth-grade students statewide will be expected to pass state tests by 2019, compared with about 73 percent for Latinos and 70 percent for black students, an analysis of state and federal records shows.
The concept is part of a fundamental and, according to critics, troubling shift in how public schools and students will be judged after the federal government recently allowed Illinois to abandon unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
A key NCLB measure long considered unreachable — that 100 percent of students must pass state exams — will be eliminated.
But the complex new approach of different standards for different groups is troubling to civil rights activists, who are not convinced that school districts will be held accountable for failing to educate minority students, and to some local educators, who say the lowered expectations will send a negative message to students.
“You’re potentially sending a message that it’s OK for some kids to not do as well,” said Timothy Truesdale, assistant superintendent in Cicero’s Morton High School District 201, where almost all students are Latino and low-income, and test scores have been dismal for years.
Via: Kaleem Caire.
Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding
The event was part of a national educational movement in computer coding instruction that is growing at Internet speeds. Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York City and Chicago, have agreed to add coding classes in the fall, mainly in high schools but in lower grades, too. And policy makers in nine states have begun awarding the same credits for computer science classes that they do for basic math and science courses, rather than treating them as electives.
There are after-school events, too, like the one in Mill Valley, where 70 parents and 90 children, from kindergartners to fifth graders, huddled over computers solving animated puzzles to learn the basics of computer logic.
College Grads Have Diplomas — and Lots of Optimism
College graduates are wearing caps and gowns–and rose-colored glasses.
A new survey of college grads shows a high level of optimism about job prospects. What the Class of 2014 may not realize is that their predecessors were also upbeat about their job prospects, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of a weak recovery.
The Accenture 2014 College Graduate Employment Survey, released Wednesday, shows 69% of this year’s class think they will have a job within six months of graduating. Another 11% have already accepted a job.
Princeton president: Graduating college with $100k debt? ‘Something’s gone wrong in your financial planning’
PLAINSBORO — If you’re an undergraduate leaving a four-year institution owing $100,000 or more in debt, “something’s gone wrong in your financial planning,” according to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber.
“It’s highly atypical of what you see coming out of colleges,” said Eisgruber, speaking before about 150 business officials today at a Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
After serving as Princeton’s provost for nine years, Eisgruber was named the university’s 20th president in July after Shirley Tilghman stepped down. In his remarks today, Eisgruber stressed the necessity of obtaining an undergraduate degree to compete in the current job market, debunking claims in news media, he said, that four-year degrees are no longer worth the increasing costs.
“If you talk to labor economists who study higher education about those kinds of topics, they are baffled by that kind of coverage in the press, because the case economically for the value of higher education is extraordinary,” Eisgruber said. “The premium from a college education today is higher than it has been at any point in our history.”
To justify this, Eisgruber referenced economists’ figures for the value of an undergraduate degree: between 7.5 percent and 15.2 percent annually in return on investment, he said.
“Think about that: How many investments can you make where the anticipated return is about 10 percent compounding?” Eisgruber asked.
The College Bottleneck in the American Opportunity Structure
Richard V. Reeves and Quentin Karpilow:
Note: Part of a two-week series devoted to exploring what we can learn about social mobility from Joseph Fishkin’s new book, Bottlenecks.
Bottlenecks control the flow of future opportunities, according to Fishkin, and they can take the form of developmental opportunities, instrumental goods (like money), or a qualifications. In the U.S. today, one qualification acts a quintessential bottleneck: the college degree.
Qualification bottlenecks
Simply put, qualification bottlenecks are:
“Educational credentials, test scores, and other requirements that one must fulfill in order to pursue some path or range of paths to valued ends.” (Fishkin, Bottlenecks, p. 156)
While developmental bottlenecks are concerned with skills-building opportunities, qualification bottlenecks relate to the requirements for pursuing a particular life path.
Of course, in many cases, developmental and qualification bottlenecks are interrelated. Scoring well on the SAT is often a pre-requisite for going to an elite college, making it a qualification bottleneck. Elite colleges, however, offer educational and skills-building opportunities that are often hard to find in other post-secondary institutions.
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Poll: Prestigious Colleges Won’t Make You Happier In Life Or Work
There’s plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a new Gallup poll suggests that, later in life, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they’re “engaged” with their work or “thriving” in all aspects of their lives, their responses don’t vary one bit whether they went to a prestigious college or not.
The surprising findings come in a survey of 29,650 college graduates of all ages by Gallup pollsters working with researchers at Purdue University. The poll asked graduates a range of questions designed to measure how well they are doing in life across factors such as income and “engagement” in their jobs and careers.
The survey set a high bar. It found that 39 percent of college grads overall say they’re “engaged” at work (which is 10 points higher than the population at large). And, while almost 5 in 6 self-report doing great in at least one sphere — whether sense of purpose, financial security, physical health, close relationships or community pride — only 11 percent are “thriving” in all five areas of well-being.
And here’s the kicker.
Get a College-Level Computer Science Education with These Free Courses
We’re lucky to have access to so many excellent free online courses for just about anything you want to study, including computer science. Here’s a curriculum list that strings various free computing courses into the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree.
aGupieWare, an independent app developer, surveyed the curricular requirements for computer science programs at several of the US’s top universities. It then developed a similar program using 15 free online courses from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and other sources. Like formal college programs, the courses are broken into introductory classes, core classes, and electives.
While this won’t get you an actual college degree, you can save tens of thousands of dollars rolling your own education. (And you might also be able to get formal college credit through exams.)
The radically sensible idea that’s lowering America’s massive monthly student debt payments
As we all know, US student debt is soaring. With a relentless rise, student debt has become the second-highest form of consumer debt in the US in recent years. In the fourth quarter, the amount of student debt outstanding hit $1.1 trillion. (This chart doesn’t show mortgage debt, which is about a dozen times as big.) But at the same time , there’s a crucial transformation going on. That’s why this chart, below, is important. It shows more people have been availing of a couple of different federal programs that lower the monthly repayments on student loans. The income-based repayment program (IBR) was instituted by the US Department of Education in 2009. It caps monthly loan payments at 15% of the borrower’s discretionary income and forgives loans after 25 years. A separate repayment plan, known as pay-as-you-earn (PAYE), was introduced in December 2012. It is aimed at helping young Americans who graduated into the miserable economy of the Great Recession. (It is only available to those who took out their first loan after Oct. 1, 2007.) It caps monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income and forgives loans after 20 years.
People seem to think these programs are a good deal, as usage of them is growing fast. In a report, analysts from Moody’s noted that the balance of all federal direct loans in repayment—which includes loans that are in forbearance and deferment—under these two programs was about 20% as of the end of March. That’s up from 14% in June 2013.
Online Learning: A Bachelor’s Level Computer Science Program Curriculum
A few months back we took an in-depth look at MIT’s free online Introduction to Computer Science course, and laid out a self-study time table to complete the class within four months, along with a companion post providing learning benchmarks to chart your progress. In the present article, I’ll step back and take a much more broad look at com-sci course offerings available for free on the internet, in order to answer a deceptively straightforward question: is it possible to complete the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree in computer science through college and university courses that are freely available online? And if so, how does one do so?
The former question is more difficult to answer than it may at first appear. There are, of course, tons of resources relating to computer science and engineering, computer programming, software engineering, etc. that can easily be found online with a few simple searches. However, despite this fact, it is very unlikely that you would find a free, basic computer science curriculum offered in one complete package from any given academic source. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Why pay $50,000 a year to go to Harvard, for example, if you could take all the exact same courses online for free?
“I want…N.C.A.A. machinery dismantled. I want faculties to take back their universities from athletic depts.”
Mary Willingham remembers the exact moment when she realized she had to go public. It was at the memorial service in the fall of 2012 for Bill Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina. During his long career, Friday had championed the amateur ideal — the notion that college athletes needed also to be students, and that academics mattered as much as wins.
Willingham went to the university in Chapel Hill in 2003 as an academic adviser to the school’s athletes, primarily its football and basketball players. She was a reading specialist, a refugee from corporate America who had become a teacher in midlife. “Mary is one of those people who believed in the mythology, that you can do both athletics and academics,” says Richard Southall, who runs the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.
But right from the start, she realized that there was a problem: Many of the athletes were coming into college unequipped to do college-level work. Around 2008, she recalls, after the N.C.A.A. changed its eligibility requirements — depending on their G.P.A.’s, athletes could now get in with lower S.A.T. scores — the situation became dramatically worse.
Teaching handwriting in a digital world
If you’ve ever watched a young child learn how to write or try to guide him or her, the process can be both comical and mildly frustrating. By the time they are formally taught how to write, some children seem to internalize some very arbitrary notions of what letters should look like, and these habits can be hard to break. Furthermore, less and less time is being spent on handwriting education at all, leaving some students to their own devices – even dyslexic children, who don’t pick up on handwriting skills as naturally.
Though most schools are unable to do anything about the visual environment of handwriting learners, the Castledown Primary School in East Sussex, England took a more proactive approach. “I’ve been frustrated with the lack of clarity of letters in fonts since my beginnings as a teacher,” headmaster Neil Small told Wired. decided to permanently change the look of school mailings and signage, commissioning a font from the Colophon Foundry that both looks fun and creates healthy habits for life.
Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes
Are you one of those old-school types who insists that kids learn better when they leave the laptops at home and take lecture notes in longhand?
If so, you’re right. There’s new evidence to prove it, and it’s unsettling because so many students aren’t really taught longhand anymore.
According to a new study based on a series of lab-based experiments comparing how much students learned after listening to the same lectures, there’s no contest. Handwriters learn better, hands down.
The ones who took their notes in longhand demonstrated in tests that they got more out of the lectures than the typists.
It’s not for the reasons most people think either. It’s not because of “multi-tasking” or the distraction available to students using laptops, especially with WiFi. That’s a problem by itself. But for this study, in a lab setting, no extraneous activity was allowed.
College tips: Advice from a professor
Beware the first semester
When I ask my students about their biggest college regret, it is almost universally, “my first semester.”Graduates often lament that they spent their entire college career trying to recover from the damage inflicted to their GPA in the first semester.
The change in class structure and freedom catches students off guard.
Professors don’t coddle like high school teachers.
Most won’t even force students to attend class.
For students in dorms, parents can’t act like a check on bad habits.
Students without a strong sense of discipline find themselves sleeping through 8 AM classes, failing to study for exams and unable to complete assignments.
Most of these students sober up and gain discipline when they see their grades for the first semester, and live with a sense of regret thereafter.
Those that don’t drop out at the end of freshman year.
Student Debt and a Broken Financial System
When the Class of 2009 entered college in 2005, they had good reason to be optimistic. The economy appeared to be healthy, and a college degree commanded higher wages. College, of course, is expensive. And almost 2 out of 3 students entering college took on some debt. They took on that debt believing that it would be easy to pay back given the strong market for those with a college degree.
But then the biggest recession in 80 years hit the United States, leading to a much worse job market for college graduates. Here is the unemployment rate as of October for college graduates who just graduated, by year from 2007 to 2011.
The Class of 2009 had an unemployment rate of 18% — twice as bad as the Class of 2007 had when they graduated. The employment to population ratio also shows how bad the market was:
Guess Who Cares For Young Adults When They Move Back Home
When my kids first left home, one of the things I enjoyed most was that I didn’t have to make any more school lunches. But today, in my home just as in millions of others, my 21- and 24-year-old kids are back, and I’m making lunches again. This is a big change from what I had expected my life to look like when my kids became young adults. Like many women of my generation, I invested a lot of time in parenting my children, with the unspoken assumption that they would enjoy the same independence and economic prosperity that I did as an adult. I expected that when they were in their 20s, I would be dining out, dropping off laundry at the dry cleaners and spending quiet weekends with my husband.
A record number of young adult children are living at home with their parents. In the U.S., 21.6 million young adults were living at home in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data. That’s 36 percent of all 18- to 31-year-olds, representing the highest rate since 1969, the first year that comparable data was available. This recently increasing trend began at the onset of the most recent recession in 2007. So I wondered: is this affecting how parents are spending their time, the way it has affected me? And are women affected differently than men?
It turns out it’s not just me. According to an analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey,1 which asks a nationally representative sample of people to record how they spend their time every day, parents with 18- to 31-old children living at home are spending at least eight hours per week caring for them. That’s causing real shifts in the time they spend relaxing. (Their sex lives are also being affected.) And women are spending significantly more time taking care of these young adult children than men are.
It’s not news that women do more work around the house than men, or that women have less leisure time than men. What’s new is that the period of care is getting longer, even if it’s mitigated by the increased responsibility and independence of these adult children.
How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance
There’s a popular forum on the Reddit online service called ‘‘Explain Like I’m Five,’’ in which redditors pose difficult and esoteric questions whose settled answers are beyond their comprehension, and ask their fellows to simplify these answers to the point where a five year old could follow them.
Parenting is a long-running game of ‘‘Explain Like I’m Five’’ (actually, it starts with ‘‘Explain like I’m a pre-verbal infant,’’ and I imagine it ends somewhere around ‘‘Explain like I’m a post-adolescent young adult’’). My daughter, Poesy, is six, and she’s turned me into a skilled player of ‘‘Explain Like I’m _______,’’ starting when she was about two and a half and found out about death and was consumed with existential terror. For about a year – a very long, very difficult year – I found myself explaining death and the circle of life, over and over again, to my kid. It’s the only time I’ve ever regretted being an atheist. I’m pretty sure that if I’d floated the idea of harps and robes and eternal paradise in a cloudy heavenscape, I could have avoided a lot of grief. But it was worth it, if only for the weird misunderstandings that my attempts engendered, like when we visited a friend’s farm and Poesy explained that the celery in the garden was made of dead people.
Since then, we’ve tackled a variety of substantial topics, from globalism, to climate change, to racism, to the Holocaust, to evolution, to the Enlightenment, to monarchism, to cosmology and quantum uncertainty. We talk about Ukrainian politics and we talk about global aviation logistics. We talk about Chinese labor migration and we talk about proportional systems of governance.
Enrollment in Student-Debt Forgiveness Programs Soars in 2014
Two federal programs that offer to wipe away huge accumulations of student debt have grown at a rapid clip this year, putting them among the government’s fastest-growing forms of financial assistance.
The Journal reported last week that enrollment in the plans—which allow students to rack up big debts and then forgive the unpaid balance after a set period—surged nearly 40% in the second half of 2013.
The growth of the programs hasn’t slowed. The number of borrowers in the income-based repayment programs climbed 24% between January through March to 1.63 million, the Education Department said. The amount of debt absorbed grew by 22% to $88 billion—now nearly a 10th of all outstanding federal student debt.
At that rate, the government took on more than $5.3 billion per month in potential student-debt liability in the first three months of the year.
Interest in the programs began to surge in the middle of last year as the Obama administration promoted the programs through emails to borrowers and on the Internet. In the nine months through March, enrollment is up a staggering 72%.
The programs’ popularity comes as top law schools have taken to advertising their own plans that offer to cover a graduate’s federal loan repayments until outstanding debt is forgiven—opening the way for free or greatly subsidized degrees at taxpayer expense.
Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy?
THE conventional wisdom these days is that kids come by everything too easily — stickers, praise, A’s, trophies. It’s outrageous, we’re told, that all kids on the field may get a thanks-for-playing token, in contrast to the good old days, when recognition was reserved for the conquering heroes.
Children are said to be indulged and overcelebrated, spared from having to confront the full impact of their inadequacy. There are ringing declarations about the benefits of frustration and the need for grit.
These themes are sounded with numbing regularity, yet those who sound them often adopt a self-congratulatory tone, as if it took extraordinary gumption to say pretty much what everyone else is saying. Indeed, this fundamentally conservative stance on children and parenting has become common even for people who are liberal on other issues.
The limits of the digital humanities
he humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants—most recently, $1 million to the University of Rochester to create a graduate fellowship.
In the lottery of life it’s best to start first
‘Firstborn children really do excel, reveals groundbreaking study’ TheGuardian.com, April 26.
What’s ‘groundbreaking’? Firstborns have been outperforming their siblings since Cain and Abel.
I’m not sure killing your brother ever counted as attainment, even in Genesis.
There are countless examples of high-achieving firstborns – Barack Obama, Sheryl Sandberg, Angela Merkel and 75 per cent of Harvard undergraduates.
You’ve taken the last claim from Michael Sandel.
The philosopher, yes.
In his Harvard class on justice, Sandel asks students whether they think their success is down to effort or luck. Most say effort. Then he asks them to put up their hands if they are the firstborn in their family.
Welcome to the Well-Educated-Barista Economy
A century ago, Henry Ford startled the world by doubling his workers’ wages, with some reaching the unheard-of level of $5 a day. Although accounts of Ford’s motivation differ, his decision fit into a larger context: A mass-production economy requires a mass-consumption society. In the absence of broad-based, steadily rising purchasing power, the engine of economic growth will sputter and die.
Fast-forward four decades to the day in the early 1950s that a Ford executive was showing United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther around a state-of-the-art automated assembly plant. The executive pointed to some gleaming new machines and asked Reuther, “How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” Reuther replied, “How are you going to get them to buy Fords ?” News accounts record no answer to either question; nor do the ensuing 60 years.
This brings us to the present day—to a slow-motion recovery that thus far has left millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed and millions more outside the workforce. One key reason for this sluggish performance is a housing industry that is falling far short of a normal rebound from recessionary lows. Economists estimate that long-term demand for new housing units should average about 1.5 million a year. After overshooting badly between 2000 and 2006, the market collapsed to barely half a million by 2009. New housing starts have increased since then to an annual rate of just under one million, far below long-term trends. According to Neil Irwin of the New York Times, NYT -2.05% investment in new residential property today represents a smaller share of the U.S. economy than at any other time since World War II. If it returned merely to its postwar average share, growth would jump by 2%, adding 1.5 million jobs and knocking a full point off the unemployment rate.
Google ends “creepy” practice of scanning Gmail education apps
Technology giant Google has ended its practice of scanning its users’ Apps for Education accounts for advertising purposes after being sued by students and other Gmail users last year, the company announced Wednesday.
The Google Apps for Education tool suite is a service the company provides for free to more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators globally. The service includes access to Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and cloud storage.
Users of the Apps for Education tools suite and other Gmail users have alleged that the company’s data scanning practices violated federal and state anti-wiretapping and privacy laws, according to the suit filed in a California federal court.
The plaintiffs have further claimed that the company crossed a “creepy line” by using scanned information to build “surreptitious” profiles of students, according to Education Week. The users who filed suit have sought money damages and an injunction preventing further scanning of accounts. The suit is ongoing, and, after a preliminary hearing in February, the court denied a motion for certification as a class action lawsuit in March.
“Trust but verify”.
When College Isn’t in the Cards
If college isn’t in a high school student’s plan for any reason, the sense of pressure and judgment that some families feel at this time of year can be overwhelming. Many seniors are deciding where they want to begin college in the fall, decisions that will be final on May 1. “I feel judgment like I haven’t felt since my kids were babies,” Adrienne Jones posted on Facebook (where many parents are proudly posting acceptances and decisions). Her son does not plan to enter college.
When a Motherlode reader asked for stories from other parents who have a child who is not interested in going to college, we asked her to tell us a little more. She described a child whose primary interests were in creative pursuits, and who is, at best, “ambivalent” about college. “He loves to learn but heavy-duty academics are not something he relishes, so on that front, I don’t want to push him into a four-year college where he would be miserable and we would spend what amounts to a fortune from our meager budget.” College of some kind may or may not lie in his future, and she is trying, amid some support from friends and some judgment, to feel sanguine. “It would really help to hear stories from other parents whose kids found a meaningful life with decent work, without college,” she wrote, as well as stories of what children who don’t choose college do after senior year.
So we asked, on Facebook, on the blog, and on Twitter, for parents to share their stories of “noncollege-bound kids” or of their noncollege-bound selves. We read about triumphs, we read about alternatives, and we read about regret. As promised, here are some of the stories.
“My partner and I are both college-educated and assumed that that was the route our intelligent child would take,” Weary1 of Seattle wrote. “But as middle and high school progressed it became clear that being intelligent is not the same thing as being scholastically inclined, and when you combine that with adolescent-onset anxiety disorder/clinical depression, well, college becomes less of an instant option. For this child, a gap year, the prospect of a two-year college in a nonliberal-arts field, working in the outdoors job that suits this child to a T … I am glad all these options exist and that we have come to accept that the four-year-college goal is not for everybody.”
Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege
There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.
I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.
Getting What Students Pay For In College
Our best public universities have spotty records in teaching such subjects as U.S.history, science and writing, and are having a persistent problem with grade inflation, according to a new report from the organization I work for, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Our report, Getting What You Pay For?: A Look at America’s Top-Ranked Public Universities, looks at key areas of quality cost effectiveness at Berkeley, Penn State, the University of Virginia and other “Top 50” public flagship universities in the United States.
Seventeen of the 50 schools require two or fewer of seven key subjects and another 21 require only three. At many schools the grading standards have grown weak, too. Between 1960 and 2006, the University of Michigan saw its average GPA increase by 0.65, the University of Wisconsin at Madison by 0.7, and the University of California at Berkeley by 0.76–almost the whole way from a C+ to a B+ average. Across schools in the study, large increases are the rule, not the exception.
Use of Medication Prescribed for Emotional or Behavioral Difficulties Among Children Aged 6–17 Years in the United States, 2011–2012
Mental health problems are common chronic conditions in children. Medication is often prescribed to treat the symptoms of these conditions. Few population-based studies have examined the use of prescription medication to treat mental health problems among younger as well as older school-aged children.
A new NCHS report describes the sociodemographic characteristics of children aged 6–17 years prescribed medication or taking medication during the past 6 months for emotional or behavioral difficulties, and describes parental reports of the perceived benefit of this medication.
Seven and one-half percent of children aged 6–17 years used prescribed medication during the past 6 months for emotional or behavioral difficulties.
A higher percentage of children insured by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties than children with private health insurance or no health insurance.A higher percentage of children in families having income below 100% of the poverty level used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties than children in families at 100% to less than 200% of the poverty level.
More than one-half of children who used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties had a parent report that this medication helped the child “a lot.”
Self-Regulation: American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist Kids
f the possible child heroes for our times, young people with epic levels of the traits we valorize, the strongest contender has got to be the kid in the marshmallow study. Social scientists are so sick of the story that some threaten suicide if forced to read about him one more time. But to review: The child—or really, nearly one-third of the more than 600 children tested in the late ’60s at Bing Nursery School on the Stanford University campus—sits in a room with a marshmallow. Having been told that if he abstains for 15 minutes he’ll get two marshmallows later, he doesn’t eat it. This kid is a paragon of self-restraint, a savant of delayed gratification. He’ll go on, or so the psychologists say, to show the straight-and-narrow qualities required to secure life’s sweeter and more elusive prizes: high SAT scores, money, health.
I began to think about the marshmallow kid and how much I wanted my own daughter to be like him one day last fall while I sat in a parent-teacher conference in her second-grade classroom and learned, as many parents do these days, that she needed to work on self-regulation. My daughter is nonconformist by nature, a miniature Sarah Silverman. She’s wildly, transgressively funny and insists on being original even when it causes her pain. The teacher at her private school, a man so hip and unthreatened that he used to keep a boa constrictor named Elvis in his classroom, had noticed she was not gently going along with the sit-still, raise-your-hand-to-speak-during-circle-time program. “So …” he said, in the most caring, best-practices way, “have you thought about occupational therapy?”
A High-School Freshman’s Investing Lesson: Time Horizons Matter
You don’t have to be old enough to drive to play master of the universe. I’m just 15 years old, but in a national stock-market game sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, I quickly grasped the way hedge fund managers must feel when they make decisions.
My friend Zachary Weiss and I had two months to beat 1,235 other groups of New Jersey high schoolers. There wasn’t any real money at stake, so we were playing for glory and, in the case of Northern Valley Demarest Regional High School, where we’re freshmen, a tour of the New York Stock Exchange.
Unfortunately, we won’t be visiting the Big Board. We didn’t even finish in the top half. But we learned some valuable lessons. First, that you shouldn’t have a two-month time frame in mind when investing. And second, that people do funny things when their own money isn’t at stake.
As the game was getting underway, my dad, who writes The Wall Street Journal’s Ahead of the Tape column, showed me some of the most volatile securities out there, which my partner and I thought of as essential for victory in a short-term game where anything can happen.
Deciding the market probably would rise, we sold short securities that produced double the daily return of VIX futures. My dad explained that, on average, they should lose over 90% of their value each year. We also bought securities that did the opposite. We used the proceeds from our shorts and bought on margin, increasing our risk and potential return. Then Vladimir Putin came into our lives and we found ourselves in 1,016th place.
Are US universities choosing rich Chinese students over Asian Americans?
An editorial in the Chinese financial magazine Caixin points out another potential obstacle for Asian Americans trying to get into college: hundreds of thousands of wealthy Chinese students that are flocking to US schools every year.
American universities, especially elite schools, have been suspected of admitting a disproportionately low number of Asian American students given their high test scores and academic performance. Over the past five to six years, these schools—faced with less private and public funding—have also started depending on international students who pay full tuition to pick up the bill. “Asian Americans now face a double barrier to entry at US universities,” writes the Caixin author Wu Yuci.