Tag Archives: college & university

Should college be marketed as the best four years of life?

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John J. Miller points out that the idea that college should be the best four years of one’s life, brought to his attention by a University of Michigan mailer, is an odd goal.

I tend to agree – and have a few thoughts about this:

1. This is a terrible setup for the rest of life. If students think that life is downhill after college (which is implied with sayings like this), then this could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps it suggests that the college life (or at least its lifestyle) should be extended before one has to “get real” and pursue more adult goals. Adult life certainly is different than college life – but this idea suggests it is the peak of life and adult life, in comparison, is lacking.

2. How does this work for students who find that college is not the best four years of their life? The college experience does not appeal to everyone nor is it perfect. If you were not thrilled with everything in college, should you feel guilt? Remorse? Did you miss something? College is not just a fun time – it is a period of transition from being a teenager to being an adult and this can be a difficult process.

3. When did this shift from college being preparation to college being “an experience” happen? Which is the more important goal, particularly for a society that hopes to have productive and learned citizens? At the same time, if one is paying $20-50k a year for college, it had better be a good experience…

Race as a lesser factor in forming friendships on Facebook

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A new study in the American Journal of Sociology finds that a shared racial identity was less important than several other factors when making friends on Facebook:

“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” said Andreas Wimmer, the study’s lead author and a sociologist at UCLA…

In fact, the strongest attraction turned out to be plain, old-fashioned social pressure. For the average student, the tendency to reciprocate a friendly overture proved to be seven times stronger than the attraction of a shared racial background, the researchers found…

Other mechanisms that proved stronger than same-race preference included having attended an elite prep school (twice as strong), hailing from a state with a particularly distinctive identity such as Illinois or Hawaii (up to two-and-a-half times stronger) and sharing an ethnic background (up to three times stronger).

Even such routine facts of college life as sharing a major or a dorm often proved at least as strong, if not stronger, than race in drawing together potential friends, the researchers found.

Interesting findings – perhaps Facebook is a new world or younger generations don’t pay as much attention to race.

Additionally, it is interesting to read about the methodology of the study which took place at a school where 97% of students had Facebook profiles and the sociologists measured friendships in terms of photo tagging (and not who were actually listed as “friends”).

A couple of questions I have: is behavior on Facebook and choosing friends reflective of actual social patterns in the real world? Is there a selection issue going on here  – not all students or people of this age use Facebook so are college students who use Facebook already more likely to form cross-racial friendships?

A new book considers the “Hipster”

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A new and short guide to the Hipster has been published: What Was the Hipster: A Sociological Investigation. One writer gives a concise guide to when the term came into popular usage:

According to a panel convened by n+1 last year at the New School, the term “hipster” re-entered the contemporary lexicon in or about 1999 (it had earlier been used interchangeably with “hepcat” in the Beat era), with the arrival of modish young men in trucker hats on Bedford Avenue.

This seems to be one of those buzz words that is difficult to define exactly. And what percentage of hipsters live on college campuses?

The book title also seems to suggest that hipsters have already had their time. If this is the case, what is next?

College courses created by students include looks at Mad Men and Seinfeld

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The University of California-Berkeley has a program called DeCal. In the program, college students teach other college students for college credit. One recent article about the program highlights how some of the courses take a longer look at television shows:

That’s because the popular show based in the 1960 is the subject of a fall course.

It’s a two-unit class that meets once a week in the school’s DeCal program. It focuses on the “thematically, symbolically and historically rich television series.” DeCal classes give a platform to students who want to dig into atypical subjects, according to the university.  This fall’s topics range from a class on the “Sociology of Seinfeld” to longboarding. DeCal is run by the students themselves, but the classes give real college credits…

The teachers…say they are covering the following themes:

  • contemporary culture
  • politics of the 1960s
  • the role of women, class and society
  • the family unit

Students have more than just a television show to watch as homework, they are also given supplemental reading assignments.

I can imagine one category of reactions to the article: “of course, when you let students teach their own courses for credit, you will end up studying television shows.”

On the other hand, there are courses like this at other schools where media content, film, movies, and other cultural products, are analyzed. As one of the student teachers suggests, Mad Men could be read/watched as saying important things about our culture. Not only does it offer some reflection on early 1960s life, it also could be read as how people in 2010 view that era.

Overall, teenagers (8-18 years old) and emerging adults (18-25) consume a lot of media-produced stories like Mad Men. Courses like this might help them better understand what they are viewing and how it lines up with the real world.

(I would be curious to know what kind of evaluations these kinds of courses receive. Do students perceive that they learned more or less in a student taught course? And then, did they actually learn more or less?)

Sociology, among other disciplines, under review in Iran

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When I first saw the story a few days ago that the Iranian government wanted to review certain disciplines in Iranian universities, I wondered if sociology made the list. Indeed it did, among other academic fields of study:

Iranian Ministry of Science and Technology announced that 12 disciplines in the humanities will have to be revised before any further developments are approved in those fields.

Abolfazl Hassani, head of Education Development at the Ministry of Education, told reporters today that the fields of “law, human rights, women’s studies, economics, sociology, media, political science, philosophy, psychology, education, administration as well as cultural and artistic administration” are under review…

He added that the contents of these sciences as taught at present are not consistent with religious principles and are based on “Western culture.”

Hassani went on to say: “It is imperative that we revise the contents of these disciplines in view of our religious and indigenous ideology and principles.”

Why exactly are these disciplines under review? One guess is that these disciplines may be considered subversive in that they suggest ideas and values that don’t line up with the ideas and values of the Iranian government. This does seem to be the general nature of a lot of sociology: an interest in questioning why things are the way they are when they might be otherwise.

Several academics question intellectual property and originality

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Several professors have recently published books questioning accepted ideas about intellectual property. One professor illustrated his approach in a recent “reading” of his new book in front of a bookstore audience:

But they didn’t hear a single word written by Mr. Boon.

Instead, he read from a 1960s sex manual, an Italian cookbook, and Bob Dylan’s memoir, among others. He had grabbed those books, more or less at random, from the store’s shelves an hour before the event. So why not read from the book he actually wrote? “I didn’t see a need to,” says Mr. Boon, an associate professor of English at York University, in Toronto. That’s because, he says, the same concepts could be found elsewhere, albeit in slightly altered form.

Not coincidentally, that’s the case he makes in his book, In Praise of Copying (Harvard University Press). Mr. Boon argues that originality is more complicated than it seems, and that imitation may be the sincerest form of being human. He writes: “I came to recognize that many of the boundaries we have set up between activities we call ‘copying’ and those we call ‘not copying’ are false, and that, objectively, phenomena that involve copying are everywhere around us.”

He read from the cookbook because recipes aren’t protected by copyright law (unless they contain a “substantial literary expression,” according to the U.S. Copyright Office). He read from the memoir because of Dylan’s liberal borrowings from traditional folk music. And he read from the sex manual because, well, sex is all about reproduction, isn’t it?

While these are just a few academics with books on the subject, it does seem to tap into a growing movement (perhaps led by younger generations?) where originality is redefined as putting existing together in new ways, more of a mash-up than original idea. Whether this will catch on with a larger audience or pass legal muster remains to be seen.

But it does raise an interesting question: how many of our thoughts and ideas are original?

Two economists explain why college has come to cost so much

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Two economists first summarize some of the arguments for why a college education has become so expensive and then provide their own overview based on “the technological forces that have reshaped the entire American economy”: rising costs relative to the price of goods associated with the time necessary to build relationships between faculty and students, a highly educated workforce, and the necessity for schools to purchase expensive technology devices to keep up with particular fields of research.

Taking this sort of view suggests that it won’t be easy to reduce costs of education since the issues present in colleges and universities are issues the entire economy faces.

h/t Instapundit

An academic conference to study elites

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“Elites” have been in the news lately and recently, Columbia University hosted a conference about elites. This is not as normal as one might think:

In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.

“When we study the poor, it’s relatively easy,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia and the author of “Gang Leader for a Day” (Penguin Press, 2008). “The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

This is an interesting topic: so why don’t academics study elites more? A few reasons (from what I know about sociology):

1. As noted above, elites can be hard to access.

2. Sociologists have often focused on deviants and the poor are often considered more outside society’s norms.

3. Could it be that many sociologists, with higher levels of education and decent incomes, might themselves be part of or are closer to the elite? If so, then there might be less interest in studying themselves or drawing attention to the class they participate in.

How the liberal arts can be good for a future in business

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Edward Tenner argues that there is evidence that liberal arts degrees can be very helpful for business careers. Tenner considers the ramifications of one survey that showed that certain fields assumed to have direct links to jobs, like psychology, do not lead to satisfied majors:

The survey has clear implications for the humanities. Their degrees are not the prologues to flipping burgers that some people suppose. Many students are using degrees in humanities to launch satisfying careers. Why not study how their courses have helped them? Why not find better ways to link the humanities with business?

What might be most helpful for students is to hear this information directly from business owners and managers.

An agent tells his story of paying college football players

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Former agent Josh Luchs talks to Sports Illustrated about paying college football players in the hopes that they would select him as their agent.

How many other stories like this are out there to be told? Are Division 1 college football and basketball, with all their various scandals (Reggie Bush being the latest major example), just a complete cesspool? And then the next question: how much do college and universities know about this and try to seriously deal with it?