Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

The religious views of American professors

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Here is a summary of a recent sociological study that examines the religious views of American professors:

In a recent article published in Sociology of Religion, sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons use data from a new, nationally representative survey of American college and university professors to test the long-running assumption that higher education leads to irreligiousness. Based on their research, they argue that “while atheism and agnosticism are much more common among professors than within the U.S. population as a whole, religious skepticism represents a minority position, even among professors teaching at elite research universities.” This has been a long-running debate amongst those who study religiosity in higher education and pay attention to trends in societal secularization.

Gross and Simmons worked with a sample size of 1,417 professors, providing an approximate representation of the more than 630,000 professors teaching full-time in universities and colleges across the United States. It should be noted that they limited their study to professors who taught in departments granting an undergraduate degree. As such, professors teaching in medical faculties and law schools were not part of the sample.

There is a lot more information here including religious beliefs by academic discipline and religious affiliation of the professors.

The conclusion of the authors is that this refutes notions that people with high levels of education (“the intelligentsia”)  are necessarily at odds with religion.

It would then be interesting to follow up with these respondents and ask how they feel their faith (or lack of faith) interacts with their research and teaching.

Schools don’t just teach academic skills; they also teach social and emotional skills

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The Chicago Tribune reports on widespread programs in schools to teach social and emotional skills to students. The state of Illinois is leading the way:

In 2004, Illinois became the first state in the nation to require all school districts to teach social and emotional skills as part of their curriculum and daily school life. That means students are expected to meet certain benchmarks, such as recognizing and managing feelings, building empathy and making responsible decisions.

The touchy-feely stuff doesn’t have to come at the expense of intellect. New evidence shows a strong link between interpersonal skills and academics, said Roger Weissberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who has studied social and emotional learning for more than 25 years.

Weissberg and his colleagues recently completed an analysis of 300 scientific studies and reached two important conclusions: Students enrolled in such programs scored at least 10 percentage points higher on achievement tests than peers who weren’t. At the same time, discipline problems were cut in half.

The article also suggests teaching social and emotional skills is tied to seeing students more as whole persons. This is all part of the broad program of socialization in schools. While academic skills are an important emphasis, so are emotional/social skills as well as other topics such as learning how to be a good citizen or acquiring skills needed for jobs.

Of “non-genius” and gratitude

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In a previous post, I commented on the surreality of watching The Social Network, the recent movie about the founding of Facebook, at a movie theater just off the Harvard University campus.  Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg is getting a lot of scrutiny in the movie’s wake, including over at the NYTimes where Robert Wright suggests that–contrary to the movie’s portrayal–Zuckerberg may not be a genius.  Wright asks rhetorically:

[C]an you be considered a genius, a visionary, if the globally dominant network you built wasn’t the fruit of far-reaching vision — if, indeed, the network’s internal momentum was such that it was almost destined to build itself, and the question was only which driven and capable entrepreneur would happen to be standing at the right place at the right time when it started to unfold?

I think that Wright’s observations are relevant–if familiar to anyone who’s ever gotten advice about finding a job.  The platitudes about “making your own luck” and “something will turn up eventually if you keep trying” may have played out on a vastly larger scale for Zuckerberg than they do for most of us, but the difference is in degree rather than kind.  Deep down, we all know that the race is not always to the swift (sorry Orkut, Friendster, et al.) and that the real world is less of a meritocracy than we delude ourselves into thinking.

To which I say:  thank goodness.  I think Wright’s right in his observation of the mechanics, but I disagree with his implication.  Zuckerberg may have benefited (unfairly!) from “positive network externalities,” but so have we all.  We all benefit from centuries of mathematical, scientific, and agricultural discoveries that allow us plentiful food and leisure.  Particularly in the U.S., we benefit from a long-running, stable democracy that few of us have made significant sacrifices for–and none of us started.

Thank God for positive network effects.  It doesn’t take a genius to remember that our response to the Zuckerbergs of the world must not be jealousy but gratitude for the unmerited, unearned gifts we ourselves have received.

Making the case for reputational rankings

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A statistician argues that the National Research Council’s study of doctoral programs released earlier this week should have included reputational rankings:

Mr. Stigler says that it was a mistake for the NRC to so thoroughly abandon the reputational measures it used in its previous doctoral studies, in 1982 and 1995. Reputational surveys are widely criticized, he says, but they do provide a check on certain kinds of qualitative measures. When the new NRC counts faculty publication rates, it does not offer any information about whether scholars in the field believe those publications are any good. (That’s especially true in humanities fields, where the NRC report does not include citation counts.)

“Everybody involved in this was trying hard, and with good intentions and high integrity,” Mr. Stigler says. “But once they decided to rule out reputation, they cut off what I consider to be the most useful measure from all past surveys.”

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle this week, Mr. Ostriker declined to reply to Mr. Stigler’s specific statistical criticisms. But he pointed out that the National Academies explicitly instructed his committee not to use reputational measures.

I was curious about this when I looked at the list of sociology doctoral programs. Perhaps several of the schools that were lower than I expected, such as the University of California – Berkeley, were lower because of this.

Stigler defends reputational measures but I’ve seen others argue that they prohibit “true” rankings within fields because certain schools retain a reputation even without the necessary output (research, good grad students, etc.). This particular discussion is part of a larger one where it will need to be decided whether reputational rankings should be used or not.

Quick review: Watching The Social Network at Harvard

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This weekend, the movie The Social Network, a disputed origin story about the founding of Facebook, hit theaters to nearly universal acclaim.  I had the opportunity to see the movie on the second day of release and can add my wreath to the many laurels heaped upon this Aaron Sorkin–David Fincher collaboration.  However, since so many others have dissected this film so thoroughly, I will refrain from a typical movie review as I feel I have little to add.  I will instead comment briefly on just how surreal it was to watch this movie at Harvard.

The AMC Loews Harvard Square 5 is located one block off the Yard at Harvard University, and the mood at the 6:30pm showing on Saturday, October 2nd was electrifying.  The audience appeared to be a mix mostly of college students and their professors, and they clearly had come to have a good time.  When the Mark Zukerberg character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, made a crack early in the movie about Boston University students not needing to study, there was a collective gasp.  When the exterior of The Thirsty Scholar made a cameo appearance, there were actual cheers.

This movie was about us–not as representatives of some abstractly-defined generation nor as students coming of age during web 2.0–but as residents of Mt. Auburn Street, two blocks away.  In the men’s bathroom after the movie, I overheard a conversation between two students debating the wisdom of trying to get into one of Lawrence Summer‘s classes now that he is returning to Harvard (after working as director of the White House National Economics Council).

Many of the best movies take us from our own specifics into the universality of the human condition.  While I am sure that The Social Network will do this for many people, it had quite the opposite effect on me.  For me, it took that most abstractly universal of all web phenonmenon–Facebook–and gave it a specific human face.  One that might well have been in the theater with me last night.

NRC ratings of doctoral programs

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The National Research Council has released its long-awaited report that measures and compares doctoral programs in a number of disciplines. Check out the interactive tool at the Chronicle of Higher Education that allows users to compare programs on a variety of the 21 criteria.

Some interesting features of the data:

1. The surveys were conducted in 2006-2007 so the information is somewhat dated. This would be particularly true in departments with productive new or departed faculty.

2. The NRC doesn’t assign ordinal ranks to schools but instead now gives ranges for each program. This seems like a sound decision that helps suggests what schools are like/near each other without having to introduce what may be artificial distinctions by saying one school is #4 while another is #6.

Just quickly looking through some of the S-rankings in sociology, some schools seem to be quite a bit off compared to other rankings over the years.

Searching for good colleges in the suburbs

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Newsweek recently put together a list of desirable colleges. One of the lists is the “25 most desirable suburban schools.” A couple of questions:

1. Are there people who specifically search for a college because it is located in a suburb? I can see the appeal to many of applying to a college in a big city – but I doubt being located in a suburb tops many lists of what people are looking for in a college.

2. I would take issue with whether several of these schools are suburban schools. The University of Notre Dame? It may have its own address and zip code but it is basically surrounded by South Bend. The real suburbs of the area, a place like Granger, are miles away. The University of Virginia is located in Charlottesville, roughly 70 miles from Richmond. For these two cases, this is a very loose definition of a suburb.

The majors of college football players; sociology 2nd

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The Wall Street Journal decided to examine the majors of “major-college” college football players (though the same story says the sample is “BCS week-one football starters”). The top two majors are business and sociology:

Only six of the 1,104 players whose majors we found were interested in art, music or film, but sociology-related topics (134 majors) and business (155) piqued their interest. An additional 108 students are majoring in a communications-related field, while only two apiece are studying architecture and mathematics. English, one of the more common majors among all college students, drew only four football players—two more than the number of players majoring in zoology. And only one player, Oregon’s Mark Asper, is studying Spanish, the lone foreign language major we found.

Some results were expected—79 players are majoring in athletics and health-related fields—but there were some rarities like fisheries and wildlife (Curtis Hughes, Minnesota) and recreation and leisure studies (Luke Stocker, Tennessee). Some majors seemed extra popular at specific schools, like the 16 starters at Georgia Tech who are majoring in management. (A team spokesman says it’s not easier than other majors, it’s just “really popular.”)

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this count is somewhat representative of college football players. Three questions come to mind:

1. So are the top majors on this list considered easier by many players? I wonder what the colleges would say about this.

2. How many players end up in a career (after they stop playing football) related to/close to their major?

3. Considering some of the concerns about graduation rates at BCS schools, I want to know whether certain majors of football players have a higher proportion of players who don’t complete their degree.

Ranking universities around the world

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Ranking American colleges and universities has become a lucrative industry with a number of publications developing rankings. This quest has been extended to ranking universities around the world but there is tension between two of the important rankings and their methodologies:

Times Higher Education produced rankings for the first time this year without the collaboration of Quacquarelli Symonds Limited. Along with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, the World University Rankings that Times Higher Education and QS published together from 2004 until last year have become the most closely watched and influential university rankings in the world.

Quacquarelli Symonds has continued to produce those rankings, now called the QS World University Rankings, and is partnering with U.S. News and World Report for their publication in the United States.

The relationship between the former collaborators has deteriorated into barely veiled animosity.

While there may be some issues between those who produce the two sets of rankings, the Times Higher Education claims it has an improved methodology which emphasizes different features of a school:

Foremost among the criticisms of the previous compilation was that it relied too heavily on a reputational survey of academics, based on fewer than 4,000 responses in 2009. THE’s new methodology is based on 13 indicators in five broad performance categories—teaching (weighted 30 percent); research influence as measured in citations (32.5 percent); research, based on volume, income, and reputation (30 percent); internationalization, based on student and staff ratios (5 percent); and knowledge transfer and innovation based on industry income (2.5 percent).

Times Higher Education said that the new system was the only global ranking to devote a section to teaching. The new methodology is much more evidence-based and relies far less on subjective criteria than the old tables, said Mr. Baty. But whereas teaching was previously measured based solely on student-staff ratio, the new rankings incorporate a reputational survey.

Which rankings system is “better” will be decided by a variety of actors. Of course, the rankings will likely differ because of the different weights placed on different university traits. The newest rankings from Times Higher Education are favorable toward American schools and UC-Berkeley made quite a jump up.

Overall, these rankings can be very powerful, not just for prestige purposes but also for helping to determining the global flow of students and money. Additionally, the companies producing and publishing the rankings have a financial stake in how the rankings are perceived both by schools and the public.