Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

Teaching sociology through the zombie apocalypse

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A sociology professor describes how his new class “Impact of the Zombie Apocalypse on the Pacific Northwest” helps him teach sociology theories and concepts:

The zombie apocalypse is the subject of a sociology course I am teaching during winter term at Linfield College in Oregon, and the class is packed. When I tell friends and colleagues, the reaction ranges from “Wow! Nice!” to giving me looks once reserved only for “Underwater Basket Weaving 101” courses taught back in the 1970s…

Sociologically speaking, one of the most fascinating aspects of zombies has been their persistence as “the Other,” something against which we can mirror our fears. Early zombie movies such as White Zombie (1932) or I Walked with a Zombie (1943) are laced with racial overtones. These morphed into George Romero’s classic critiques of white middle-class fears of black America, to more recent movies that feed off our love-hate relationship with technology and our fear of eco-disasters. While we express anxieties about 9/11 subpopulations, our movies portray zombies that are actually dormant cells, ready to unleash themselves on an unsuspecting populace. Unlike vampires, werewolves, aliens or orcs, zombies present a relatively blank slate against which we can project our fears.

Most sociological theory focuses on the concept of utopia or dystopia. In dystopic societies, people grapple with things that are undesirable or frightening, and they respond to their fears. For many in 21st century America, those fears include capitalism, racism, rapid technological change, urban shifts or even semi-automatic rifles.

The zombie apocalypse class provides a pedagogical tool to spark conversation. In the face of change, how do we survive as a society? How do we maintain group cohesion? In The Walking Dead, survival requires greater brutality and physical strength. In that scenario, how do women avoid being reduced to “women’s work?” And how would nations react to an environmental disaster or apocalypse, as in World War Z? How do zombie-like events influence foreign policy

The class sounds reasonable to me – provided that the class has sufficient sociological content – though I know classes like these tend to draw attention from people who think colleges (and sociologists?) aren’t teaching much (or not teaching the right stuff) in the first place. Using current themes, such as those found in numerous television shows and movies that students are particularly immersed in, is one way to hook students and encourage them to think more deeply about social life. In this case, it seems to me that pushing students to think more about what they would consider an utopia or dystopia could be revealing in how they individualistically approach the world and encourage them to pull back a bit and consider the bigger social forces at work and other people involved. This is a bit tongue in cheek but we don’t have to blow up major cities or have major diseases or creatures to get to this point. Imagine if college students could not have access to their smartphones and computers – imagine at least the short-term apocalypse! But, of course, the world is bigger than just zombies or a loss of cellphones and studying apocalypses may help students see the basics of society that we all tend to take for granted.

College freshman more confident than ever about their abilities compared to their peers

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Data from the American Freshman Survey suggests new college freshman are more confident about their abilities than before:

Pyschologist Jean Twenge and her colleagues compiled the data and found that over the last four decades there’s been a dramatic rise in the number of students who describe themselves as being ‘above average’ in the areas of academic ability, drive to achieve, mathematical ability, and self-confidence.

But in appraising the traits that are considered less individualistic – co-operativeness, understanding others, and spirituality – the numbers either stayed at slightly decreased over the same period.

Researchers also found a disconnect between the student’s opinions of themselves and actual ability.

While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far less than those of their 1960s counterparts.

Also on the decline is the amount of time spent studying, with little more than a third of students saying they study for six or more hours a week compared to almost half of all students claiming the same in the late 1980s.

It is also interesting to look at these individual questions over time:

A few thoughts about this chart and the findings:

1. The drive to achieve has always been high in this survey compared to peers but social self-confidence and writing ability look to be around 50% today, which would reflect accurate comparisons to the average (or the median: half above, half below).

2. Across these five categories, it looks like there is a consistent uptick of about 15-20%. It is not as if all students are more confident but this is a sizable group of roughly 1 in 6 or 1 in 5.

3. Twenge suggests there is not the same uptick in confidence in less individualistic traits.  While this might be due to lesser emphasis on social traits, might it also suggest college freshmen think less highly of or trust their peers less over time?

4. It is less clear from these articles about how colleges should respond to this, particularly in an era where big money is spent on college degrees. Are results better by the time students graduate and beyond? Do colleges encourage students to think less individualistically?

Website of the day: gradeinflation.com

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Perhaps it is finals week that piqued my interest in this particular website: gradeinflation.com. There is a lot of fascinating information on this site about college grading trends in recent decades. Yes, my own institution is represented on the site.

If this puts you in the grading spirit, you can try out The Grading Game app which one Wired reviewer liked:

I’m frankly surprised by how much I like The Grading Game. It is ultimately about grading papers and looking for spelling errors, but somehow the intense time limit, scoring mechanics and various modes wrapped around that seemingly bland premise make the game super addictive. And, as someone who does a great degree of text-editing, I suspect that this simple iPhone app is making me better at my job.

Not quite the same experience but it is an attempt to put grading through the gamification process.

NCAA Scholarly Colloquium: ideology versus “In God we trust; everyone else should bring data”

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The Chronicle of Higher Education examines how much criticism of the NCAA will be allowed at its upcoming annual Scholarly Colloquium and includes a fascinating quote about how data should be used:

The colloquium was the brainchild of Myles Brand, a former NCAA president and philosopher who saw a need for more serious research on college sports. He and others believed that such an event could foster more open dialogue between the scholars who study sport issues and the people who work in the game.

Mr. Brand emphasized that the colloquium should be data-based and should avoid ideology. “Myles always used to joke: ‘In God we trust; everyone else should bring data,'” said Mr. Renfro, a former top adviser to Mr. Brand.

But as Mr. Renfro watched presentations at last year’s colloquium, which focused on changes the NCAA has made in its academic policies in recent years, he did not see a variety of perspectives.

“I was hearing virtually one voice being sung by a number of people … and it was relatively critical of the NCAA’s academic-reform effort,” he said. “I don’t care whether it was critical or not, but I care about whether there are different perspectives presented.”

This is a classic argument: data versus ideology, facts versus opinions. This short bit about Myles Brand makes it sound like Brand thought bringing more data to the table when discussing the NCAA would be a good thing. Data might blunt opinions and arguments and push people with an agenda to back up their arguments. It could lead to more constructive conversations. But, data is not completely divorced from ideology. Researchers choose what kind of topics to study. Data has to be collected in a good manner. Interpreting data is still an important skill; people can use data incorrectly. And it sounds like an issue here is that people might be able to use data to continue to criticize the NCAA – and this does not make the NCAA happy.

Generally, I’m in favor of bringing more data to the table when discussing issues. However, having data doesn’t necessarily solve problems. As I tell my statistics classes, I don’t want them to be people who blindly believe all data or statistics because it is data and I also don’t want them to be people who dismiss all data or statistics because they can be misused and twisted. It sounds like some of this still needs to be sorted out with the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium.

Shared cultural interests leads to hiring at elite firms

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A new sociological study argues having the right cultural interests or pursuing certain cultural activities can lead to getting a job at elite firms:

Big-time investment banks, law firms and management consulting companies choose new workers much as they would choose friends or dates, zeroing in on shared leisure activities, life experiences and personality styles, a new study finds…

As a result, evaluators described their own and others’ firms as having distinct personalities related to employees’ extracurricular interests and social styles. Companies ranged from “sporty” and “scrappy” to “egghead” and “country club.” One outfit even specialized in hiring people with drab personalities.

Top-ranked firms uniformly favored applicants who cited upper–middle class leisure pursuits such as rock climbing, playing the cello or enjoying film noir.

Picking employees from the same cultural basket may have pluses and minuses, Rivera adds. Hiring people with common traits and interests may create a cohesive work force. But shunning prospective employees with different life histories could also make firms susceptible to reaching decisions quickly without evaluating alternative ideas.

This challenges the American ideal of meritocracy where hard work should lead to a job. While the study suggests these cultural interests don’t matter as much when organizations are hiring for more technical jobs, it does matter for white-collar and upper-class jobs. This could also challenge the role of college courses: how many college classes are about developing a “scrappy” or “country club” approach to life? In contrast, the experience outside the classroom at some colleges (plus the applicants’ earlier life history) might contribute quite a bit to learning about and then developing these cultural skills.

It would also be interesting to look more at the personalities involved in hiring and branding that companies develop. Marketing today often involves selling a brand and image more so than focusing on the particulars of a product. Is this branding simply about marketing or does it bleed through the culture of the entire organization?

TV shows for teenagers show professors as “old, boring, white, and mean”

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Here is how college professors are portrayed on television shows for teenagers: “old, boring, white, and mean.”

They may be fictional characters, but their small-screen images may affect students in big ways, says one researcher. Barbara F. Tobolowsky, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, found that television’s image of the professor is intimidating, uninterested, and generally old, boring, and white. She is scheduled to present a working paper on her research, “The Primetime Professoriate: Representations of Faculty on Television,” this week at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education…

While previous studies of television have focused on how much time students spend watching TV and not studying, Ms. Tobolowsky looked at the content of those television shows. In her study, Ms. Tobolowsky, who has a master’s degree in film history and criticism and who previously worked in the film industry, analyzed 10 shows that aired from 1998 to 2010 and were geared toward the 12-to-18-year-old demographic group in the Nielsen ratings.

Scrutinizing professors in those shows, she examined characters’ clothing and ways of talking, camera angles and background music, and a variety of other film nuances to break down how enthusiastic the faculty were and how they interacted with students, along with other criteria.

On the whole, she says, professors on the television shows tended to be relatively old, white, and traditional, wearing sweater-vests and sporting graying hair. Young, female, and minority professors on the shows tended to teach only at arts-oriented institutions or community colleges. Most were intimidating or, at the very least, distant, throwing a scare into characters like Matt on 7th Heaven, who worried he’d seem weak if he asked a question in class.

This study seems to suggest that shows for teenagers depict professors as the enemy. While not all teenagers love school, I wonder if this is part of a larger message on television and in movies that the learning part of school isn’t that important while the social aspects, think of the message in Mean Girls, is what really matters. Of course, there is a genre of movies that depicts heroic teachers but these are formulaic in their own ways.

It would be interesting to compare these depictions to how professors are portrayed on shows aimed at adults. I’m reminded of the TNT show Perception that features Eric McCormarck playing a neuroscientist at a Chicago area university. (Disclosure: I know about this show because I tend to catch a few minutes of its opening after watching Major Crimes which I watch because of The Closer.) The show tends to open in this way: McCormack is at the front of the classroom that is full of eager students who are hanging on his every word. At the side of the room is his trusty graduate student TA who occasionally chimes in. McCormack has scribbled all sorts of profound things on the board and then he ends class with a deep question or a witty joke. When the class ends, he quickly leaves the classroom and gets wrapped up in some fascinating case. Sound like a typical college classroom? While the professor here is depicted as a cool young guy, it is not exactly realistic to most college classrooms.

I realize what takes place day in and day out in a college classroom likely does not make scintillating television. Indeed, have you watched DVDs of The Great Courses? Yet, this doesn’t mean there isn’t something worthwhile going on in that classroom that doesn’t require severely stereotyping professors one way or the other depending on the audience.

Encourage research collaboration by overlapping daily walking paths

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Lots of academics are talking about interdisciplinary research and teaching and a new study helps point the way forward: make sure different groups have overlapping daily walking paths.

Researchers who occupy the same building are 33 percent more likely to form new collaborations than researchers who occupy different buildings, and scientists who occupy the same floor are 57 percent more likely to form new collaborations than investigators who occupy different buildings, he said.
One of these assumptions is that passive contacts between inhabitants of a building—just bumping into people as you go about your daily business—makes it more likely that you’ll share ideas and eventually engage in formal collaborations. This assumption is based on the work of ISR researcher Leon Festinger, who studied the friendships that developed among dormitory residents in the 1950s.
Owen-Smith and colleagues examined the relationship between office and lab proximity and walking patterns, and found that linear distance between offices was less important than overlap in daily walking paths. They developed the concept of zonal overlap as a way to operationalize Festinger’s idea of passive contact. “We looked at how much overlap existed for any two researchers moving between lab space, office space, and the nearest bathroom and elevator,” Owen-Smith said. “And we found that net of the distance between their offices, for every 100 feet of zonal overlap, collaborations increased by 20 percent and grant funding increased between 21 and 30 percent.”
Owen-Smith and colleagues also found that the likelihood of passive contacts can be more simply assessed by using a measure of “door passing”—whether one investigator’s work path passes by another’s office door.

This sounds like a more small-scale study but it ties into the broader concept of compulsion of proximity. Put people in spaces where they are more likely to run into each other and they are more likely to interact face-to-face. This would go for making friends on a dorm floor in college (random assignments lead to college long or life-long friendships), finding marriage partners through social networks , and apparently works for researchers.

One expanding housing market: upscale, off-campus college housing

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Several builders are preparing for an area of the housing market that is set to expand: upscale, off-campus housing for college students.

These days the companies have begun to build upscale houses with bedrooms clustered around gourmet kitchens and access to amenity-filled clubhouses. Known as cottage-style housing, the relatively new product is becoming popular with operators and students.

Nationwide, there are 35 cottage communities with nearly 19,000 beds. Another 18 are under way or in the works, with roughly 12,000 beds, said Wes Rogers, chief executive of Landmark Properties Inc., which has built roughly one-third of the cottages in the U.S. While cottage-style housing represents a small percentage of the nearly 500,000 beds controlled by the sector’s top companies, industry watchers expect the bed count to increase as the product catches on…

Developers are building these properties to house an expanding student population: More than three million high-school students are expected to graduate annually until the 2018-19 academic year, well above the roughly 2.5 million graduating in 1993-1994, according to the Department of Education.

Moreover, universities don’t have enough beds and much of the current supply, tall towers with communal bathrooms, has lost favor among the McMansion generation. Schools, many struggling with budget cuts, can’t afford to build new dorms.

It’s not college, it’s luxury living! Or at least a small approximation of it.

A few thoughts about this:

1. Assuming this off-campus housing expansion continues, does this mean colleges will have to engage in an arms race for housing to keep dorms occupied? In other words, these nicer off-campus opportunities might impede campus cash flows if more students are drawn out of dorms.

2. The article doesn’t talk about this but could this lead to more of a have vs. have-not attitude on campus? Not everyone can access this kind of living quarters.

3. I wonder if better housing has any positive effect on student learning and development. Do students act differently if the (off-campus) housing is nicer?

Faculty advice column: for the “average student,” sociology might not be most practical way to get a job

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Choosing a college major is definitely a charged subject today, particularly when discussing potential earnings. Here is some interesting advice given by a faculty member to an undergraduate interested in sociology:

Anonymous asks, “I’m an undecided freshman. My parents want me to choose a ‘practical major’ like engineering, but I think I would be more passionate about a sociology major. Should I study what my parents want me to study, or should I do what I want?”

Hmmm. You should choose sociology! Or any CHASS major! (Just kidding, sort of, I need to make up for last time.) Honestly, in this current job and economic climate I think it would be foolish to not at least strongly consider the employment prospects of one’s chosen major. That said, employment means doing something at least 40 hours/week for many, many years. The last thing you want to do is choose an area which will be drudgery instead of fulfillment. While engineering is particularly practical for the current job market, that does not mean sociology (or any other major) is impractical. As I mentioned in an earlier column, social sciences are great for developing critical thinking skills and good writing skills. These are most definitely highly-valued skills by many employers.

That said, if you choose a more passion-based major, you really need to invest your passion in it because it probably will not be as easy to find a job as if you had a mechanical engineering degree. Don’t take classes because you were told they were easy. Take them because they have a great professor who will challenge you to think and learn in new ways. Don’t shy away from the classes with 20 page papers — take them and hone your writing skills. Be proactive in working with faculty, researching with faculty, and in building relationships. Work with a local non-profit or government agency that fills your passion and build your job-market skills.

For the average student, sociology may not be as practical as a degree with a more obvious and direct pipeline to employment, but if you put your heart into it, develop your skills, abilities and maturity, you will come out just as employable — if not more so — than if you chose a practical major to which you found you could not truly dedicate yourself.

These are common ideas: certain majors lead more easily to jobs while sociology and other social science majors don’t lead as easily to jobs but students majoring in them can gain valuable skills that employers want.

However, the last paragraph is key here: the suggestion is that sociology students should be more dedicated to their major/field because they will have to overcome the difference in practicality compared to other majors. This is interesting because sociology is often considered an easier major. But, this professor suggests sociology majors should be even more interested and devoted to the major to be able to compete on the job market. Does this mean sociology majors should be higher caliber students?

Mapping the social network of American colleges by status

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating story and interactive area that shows social networks among American universities and colleges:

Each year colleges submit “comparison groups” to the U.S. Department of Education to get feedback on how their institution stacks up in terms of finances, enrollment, and other measures tabulated in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The groups sometimes represent a college’s actual peers but more often reveal their aspirations.

The Chronicle analyzed the relationships of nearly 1,600 four-year colleges that make up those groups to map out the power players in higher education.

The typical college selected a comparison group of 16 colleges with a higher average SAT score and graduation rate than its own, lower acceptance rate, and larger endowment, budget, and enrollment.

The eight Ivy League colleges among them chose only 12 institutions outside their own number as peers—not surprisingly, often including the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

So it looks like colleges themselves act like high school students applying to college as laid out by sociologist Mitchell Stevens in Making a Class: they want to improve their own status by attaching themselves to a higher status institution.

It would take some time to figure this out based on entering different college names but here would be some intriguing queries that could be answered by the interactive graphic:

1. Which colleges are most aspirational?

2. Which college are the best judges of their own level, meaning that they select institutions that also select them?

3. What are the institutions that act as bridges, meaning they join together networks of different kinds of colleges or regions of colleges?

4. Are there any colleges that actually underestimate their own status by choosing institutions “below” them?