The New York Times holds a discussion about the epidemic of cheating that includes two teachers (one college, one high school) and a recent college graduate. Interesting perspectives.
More from the college professor in the discussion at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
It seems like I have been reading for years about studies that say that teenagers perform much better in school when the starting time is pushed back. Here is another study that suggests starting the day 30 minutes later leads to “stunning” results.
It raises a question: why don’t more schools respond by changing their starting times? I’ve heard arguments about this interfering with after-school activities, particularly sports. It may conflict with schedules for siblings in schools with different starting times or may lead to a shortage of buses since early high school times mean the buses can be used again for elementary students. And there are more reasons that get thrown around, many probably legitimate.
But: if the real goal of educators (and the supporting parents) is to help students succeed in school (specifically: boost learning), isn’t this something that needs to change?
An AP story discusses a supposed movement to take the suburbs more seriously and move beyond common negative stereotypes. One scholar accurately notes:
“Change your mind about what the suburbs are,” said Robert Puentes, a suburban scholar at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not just bedroom communities for center-city workers. They’re not just rich enclaves. They’re not all economically stable. They’re not all exclusively white.”
“These are not your father’s suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Efforts toward this end include a new museum in Johnson County, Kansas and several academic centers.
These stereotypes will take time to overcome. Common stereotypes, dating back to at least the 1950s, include: bland homes and people, desperate housewives, whites only, lifestyles centered all around children, wealthy people only, conservative, low-brow, garish (from strip malls to shopping malls to McMansions).
The story cites two academic centers for suburban studies. For much of the last 100 years, academics have often led the way in deriding suburbia. To fight some of these stereotypes, more academics would need to be able to move beyond knee-jerk reactions and acknowledge suburbia’s complexities.
The New York Times reports on a problem for some factories: finding workers that have enough skills to operate more complicated machinery. An anecdote from a company outside Cleveland illustrates the issue:
All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level. A significant portion of recent applicants failed, and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs. It is now struggling to fill 100 positions.
“You would think in tough economic times that you would have your pick of people,” said Thomas J. Murphy, chief executive of Ben Venue.
Many factory jobs today aren’t just manual labor jobs. An education is not just for office jobs; it is helpful or required for most sectors of the economy.
How to measure the value of a college degree is an interesting question: should it be measured in dollars, experiences, things learned? If one is measuring in terms of future monetary value, Businessweek reports on a new study suggesting a college degree has been overvalued:
Over the course of a working life, college graduates earn more than high school graduates. Over the past decade, research estimates have pegged that figure at $900,00, $1.2 million, and $1.6 million.
But new research suggests that the monetary value of a college degree may be vastly overblown. According to a study conducted by PayScale for Bloomberg Businessweek, the value of a college degree may be a lot closer to $400,000 over 30 years and varies wildly from school to school. According to the PayScale study, the number of schools that actually make good on the estimates of the earlier research is vanishingly small. There are only 17 schools in the study whose graduates can expect to recoup the cost of their education and out-earn a high school graduate by $1.2 million, including four where they can do so to the tune of $1.6 million.
The article goes on to list the best colleges for a return on one’s investment and mentions that some schools have taken issue with the methodology of the study. The top 10 schools for returns are what you would expect: MIT, CIT, the Ivys plus Harvey Mudd and Notre Dame. Just looking at the top 10 and their list of the best return in each state, most of these schools are quite expensive.
A question based on this report: if many colleges are getting increasingly expensive, particularly private schools and flagship public universities, and their pay-off is not as much as previously thought, will people stop attending them? Is taking on a decent amount of debt worth it for most schools? Elite schools provide extra wealth but the average student is far from this report’s top 10 schools. If more sources corroborate this sort of evidence, the college landscape might change dramatically.
A NY Times opinion piece from Harvard law professor Noah Feldman makes this argument: “The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.” Feldman explores the changes in the Supreme Court (the appointment of Kagan would make it 6 Catholics, 3 Jews) and Princeton (“As late as 1958, the year of the “dirty bicker” in which Jews were conspicuously excluded from its eating clubs, Princeton could fairly have been seen as a redoubt of all-male Protestant privilege).
So what changed? Feldman provides some reasons: “the anti-aristocratic ideals of the Constitution,” education was an important defining trait for WASPs so opening up universities was a big step, and the American value of fair play. The result:
Together, these social beliefs in equality undercut the impulse toward exclusive privilege that every successful group indulges on occasion. A handful of exceptions for admission to societies, clubs and colleges — trivial in and of themselves — helped break down barriers more broadly. This was not just a case of an elite looking outside itself for rejuvenation: the inclusiveness of the last 50 years has been the product of sincerely held ideals put into action.
These may be accurate reasons. But they seem to ignore the historical context: something happened in the 1960s that changed institutions like Ivy League schools and led to a very different looking Supreme Court. In that decade, the Civil Rights Movement plus an explosion in higher education for the burgeoning US population plus higher rates of immigration from non-European locales plus cultural change (rock ‘n’ roll, television, more open questioning of authority, etc.), changed, or at least began to change, the socioeconomic status of WASPs.
Several academics make an argument in The Chronicle for Higher Education for reducing the number of published research articles in order to limit low-quality publications. The measure of “poor research” is linked to the idea that later science should build upon previous findings:
Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.
The authors go on to say that uncited articles are akin to “useless information.” This seems a bit premature: uncited articles might be the result of studies in new fields or new approaches to old problems. Graduate students are often told to specialize and perhaps this article glut is due to very specific knowledge and more recent articles that have less of a broad appeal. Regardless, good journals are still publishing these pieces, indicating that somewhere in the peer review process, editors and reviewers thought the authors made a scientific contribution.
Some of the proposed solutions include a greater emphasis on citation and journal impact scores.
A story in the NY Times describes how at least 10 law schools have deliberately made their grades more lenient. The reason? To have their students appear more attractive in a weak job market.
[Loyola Law School Los Angeles] is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.
The article also discusses other interesting measures including abandoning traditional grades and paying students to take unpaid internships.
Two articles that disagree about whether young male soccer players in America should be going to Division One college programs to play. There are now many more female Division One soccer programs and they can offer more scholarships than men’s teams.
It has been my understanding that soccer is like baseball; college, for many, is a waste of time. (Baseball players have terrible education levels due to this common life in the minor leagues.) The best young soccer players in the world are often discovered before they are 15. College simply delays their development. Soccer has a sort of informal minor league system; young players play for lesser leagues (like MLS in the US or Division One or Two in England) before they are bought by a first-rate squad. American soccer players are only now consistently playing for better overseas squads, such as Tim Howard, Clint Dempsey, and Landon Donovan in the Premier League.
For women, it is a different story. There is a professional women’s league in the US – but it attracts little attention and pays little. College offers good competition while getting an education. Outside of going on to play for the Women’s World Cup, many players may never see the attention they get in college.
1. The New York Times: How A Soccer Star Is Made.
2. Minding the Campus: Why U.S. Men’s Soccer Will Now Decline.
David Brooks takes a run at defending the liberal arts. Perhaps not an easy task in this financial milieu. According to Brooks, the benefits: improved reading and writing, increased knowledge of the language of emotion, providing a wealth of analogies, and a better understanding of “The Big Shaggy.” Seems like a typical defense…though I question the use of the term “The Big Shaggy.”
Legally Sociable 