Tag Archives: college & university

College athletes clustering in a few majors, including sociology

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I’ve written before about sociology being considered an “easy major” by athletes. A new report looks at some notable schools and considers how clustered male athletes are within majors:

Since the NCAA invented the APR [Academic Progress Rate] in 2003, critics have worried that it would discourage athletes from choosing difficult majors or from changing course once they started down a given track. Some have anticipated a “clustering” of athletes in certain majors, such as sociology or communication, and others have expressed concern about the creation of broad programs such as general studies with athletes in mind.

A 2008 analysis by USA Today found that clustering happens at most institutions, and of the three sports programs Shalala compares, Miami football is most questionable, with 62.5 percent of the team studying one of two majors. While clustering on a small scale isn’t necessarily unusual, researchers who study the phenomenon say the 25-percent mark is where things start getting fishy.

A full 37.5 percent of Miami’s junior and senior football players were majoring in liberal arts in 2008, and 25 percent in sports administration. The same 37.5 percent of Stanford’s junior and senior softball players were in one major — but it was human biology — and 36.8 percent of baseball players majored in sociology. Notre Dame athletes didn’t cluster at all, according to USA Today’s analysis.

While this report by Donna Shalala, president of Miami, seems tied to troubles their football program has with violating NCAA regulations, the USA Today 2008 analysis offers more insights. While sociology is lumped within the social sciences, you can mouse over the graphics and while the most clustering seems to happen in the social sciences, the sociology clusters are numerous.

Alas, this collected data is still limited:

Assisted by sports information and other school offices, USA TODAY obtained the majors for about 85% of the athletes in the study. For most of the rest, no major was listed. Primary or first-listed majors were used in the cases of students with multiple majors.

Initially, part of the intent was to compare the percentages of athletes in a major with those of the student body as a whole. That is, if 30% of baseball players are in sociology, is 30% of the entire student body enrolled in sociology? However, short of getting athletes’ private records and the federal reporting code of each athlete’s major, large-scale comparisons are unreliable because some schools have multiple versions of some majors.

The NCAA collects similar information, but does not release it and has no current plans to study it.

Hmmm…I wonder why the NCAA has no interest in analyzing this data.

ACT scores suggest most students not ready for college

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The ACT has released a report that says the majority of students who take the test are not ready for college:

Only one in four college-bound high school graduates is adequately prepared for college-level English, reading, math and science, according to report released Wednesday by the ACT college admissions test.

Some 28 percent of the members of the high school class of 2011 failed to meet readiness benchmarks in any of the four core subject areas.

“ACT results continue to show an alarmingly high number of students who are graduating without all the academic skills they need to succeed after high school,” the report stated…

Readiness was defined as a student having a 50 percent chance of getting a B or a 75 percent chance of getting a C in first-year courses English Composition, College Algebra, Biology and social sciences.

Additionally, there are some pretty big gaps between racial and ethnic groups.

Here are some possible courses of action in response to this information:

1. Tell colleges that they need to offer more remedial classes and get students up to speed.

2. Add to the argument that perhaps college isn’t for all students.

3. Tell high schools that they need to keep their standards high and improve their ability to prepare students for college.

3a. Push the issue further down the educational ladder before high school.

4. Attack the ACT test. Perhaps it isn’t a great predictor of success, perhaps it is culturally biased, perhaps the students who take the ACT are not the same who take the SAT, etc.

I wonder how colleges will respond to this information. I would guess that this really doesn’t impact more elite schools who have their pick of students who have higher ACT scores. But where does this leave schools that accept a broader range of students?

Sociological findings of Academically Adrift in Doonesbury

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The findings of Academically Adrift stirred up a lot of discussion. (See an earlier post here.) Eight months after the book was released, its findings made it way to the Sunday comics (August 14) as Doonesbury picked up on the information.

Neither colleges or emerging adults look too good here.

It would be interesting to hear Gary Trudeau talk about how he discovered this information and what he wanted to say in this particular comic strip.

Forbes’ college rankings signals possible trend of looking at alumni earnings and status

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The college rankings business is a lucrative one and there are a number of different players with a number of different measures. Forbes recently released its 2011 rankings and they have a particular angle that seems aimed at unseating the rankings of US News & World Report:

Our annual ranking of the 650 best undergraduate institutions focuses on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, graduation rates and low levels of debt. Unlike other lists, we pointedly ignore ephemeral measures such as school “reputation” and ill-conceived metrics that reward wasteful spending. We try and evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would: Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree? The rankings are prepared exclusively for Forbes by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a Washington, D.C. think tank founded by Ohio University economist Richard Vedder.

With phrases like “ephemeral measures” and “ill-conceived metrics,” Forbes claims to have a better methodology. This new approach helps fill a particular niche in the college rankings market: those looking for the “biggest bang for your educational buck.”

In their rankings, 30% of the final score is based on “Post-Graduate Success.” This is comprised of three values: “Listings of Alumni in Who’s Who in America” (10%), “Salary of Alumni from payscale.com” (15%), and “Alumni in Forbes/CCAP Corporate Officers List” (5%). These may be good measures (Forbes goes to some effort to defend them) but I think there is a larger issue at play here: are these good measures by which to evaluate a college degree and experience? Is a college degree simply about obtaining a certain income and status?

At this point, many rankings and assessment tools rely on the experiences of students while they are in school. But, with an increasing price for a college degree and a growing interest in showing that college students do learn important skills and content in college, I think we’ll see more measures of and a greater emphasis placed on post-graduation information. This push will probably come from both outsiders, Forbes, parents and students, the government, etc., and college insiders. This could be good and bad. On the good side, it could help schools tailor their offerings and training to what students need to succeed in the adult world. On the bad side, if value or bang-for-your-buck becomes the overriding concern, college and particular degrees simply become paths to higher or lower-income outcomes. This could particularly harm liberal arts schools or non-professional majors.

In the coming years, perhaps Forbes will steal some of the market away from US News with the financial angle. But this push is not without consequences for everyone involved.

(Here is another methodological concern: 17.5% of a school’s total score is based on ratings from RateMyProfessors.com. Forbes suggests it cannot be manipulated by schools and is uniform across schools but this is a pretty high percentage.)

(Related: a new report rates colleges by debt per degree. A quick explanation:

Its authors say they aim to give a more complete picture of higher education — rather than judging by graduation rates alone or by default rates alone — by dividing the total amount of money undergraduates borrow at a college by the number of degrees it awards.

We’ll see if this catches on.)

A call for more TV shows about science and academia

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Certain television genres are well-established. One academic suggests TV should branch out and include a show about science, knowledge, and academia:

No matter what new sitcoms and dramas the networks dream up this coming fall, I can almost guarantee the absence of one type of show: a show about academia. But a television show about academics — professors, scientist and graduate students — is more necessary than ever before. And with a film being made out of Piled Higher and Deeper — an online comic about the trials and tribulations of graduate students — the time may be right to fill this gaping hole on the small screen…

The interplay between the objective quest for knowledge and the all-too-human drama that surrounds it is something that the average viewer has probably heard of, but does not know much about.

And there’s no shortage of real drama to fuel story lines. This show, which I would call The Ivory Tower, would be packed with backstabbing and gossip, glimpses into the intellectual servitude of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the agony of dissertation defenses, the thrill of scientific discoveries, the ulcer-creating tenure process, professors’ quests for 15 minutes of fame, and, of course, the inevitable lab love affairs.

Episodes could revolve around topics ranging from the conflict-of-interest riddled nature of how scientific ideas are vetted by peers, to those rare but gut-wrenching cases of academic dishonesty and faking data, to the intense deliberations over thesis defenses. Academia is a very non-rational endeavor.

Here are a few things such a show would have to deal with:

1. There seems to be a good number of Americans who think academics are elitist or liberal or Godless (or perhaps all three). Viewers need to be able to relate to the characters or the settings. This is an image problem.

2. As the writer suggests, the show would have to revolve around relationships in the same way that every other show does. Yes, it would have to include all of TV’s tropes including unrequited love between co-workers and bad/incompetent bosses.

3. I have a sneaking suspicion that this whole proposal is a joke. Who wants to watch “the agony of dissertation defenses” or the “ulcer-creating tenure process”?

4. Perhaps such a show could be based around an innovative science or research project. Therefore, the overall payoff of the show wouldn’t just be the episode-to-episode relationships but rather a large story arc about curing cancer or developing space travel vehicles for humans that would go beyond the moon.

4a. Why couldn’t the project-driven show work as a reality show on Discovery or National Geographic?

5. I suspect many academics get into academia because they are excited about “the objective quest for knowledge.” But how many professors have given such a speech to students about the joys of research, hard work, and discovery only to be met with blank stares? Some students enjoy this – but would the general public?

6. Which discipline would get to be featured in such a show? I wonder how TV creators and producers would make this choice. I imagine they would have to go with something relatively well-known and/or controversial.

7. There are plenty of shows and movies about high school. There still aren’t that many about college, let alone the academic side of college. Is this because high school is a more universal experience or is it more uniform across schools?

Beating up on the sociology degree

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I spotted two stories in recent days that suggest sociology majors have no value. The first was at the Wall Street Journal and titled “Sociology and Other ‘Meathead’ Majors“:

In this happy season of college graduations, students and parents will probably not be reflecting on the poor choices those students made in selecting their courses and majors…Most colleges offer a cornucopia of choices, and most of the choices are bad.

The bad choices are more attractive because they are easy. Picking not quite at random, let’s take sociology. That great American democrat Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law “Meathead” for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn’t get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities…

Others try to imitate the sciences and call themselves “social scientists.” The best imitators of scientists are the economists. Among social scientists they rank highest in rigor, which means in mathematics. They also rank highest in boastful pretension, and you can lose more money listening to them than by trying to read books in sociology. Just as Gender Studies taints the whole university with its sexless fantasies, so economists infect their neighbors with the imitation science they peddle. (Game theorists, I’m talking about you.)

I am not quite sure what is going on here as Mansfield indicts a broad swath of disciplines, including implicating his own field of political science. Is he suggesting that the natural sciences are not “counterfeit majors” because they deal with facts? Should colleges be steering all students away from majors other than the natural sciences that are unwilling to make value judgments? Mansfield seems more interested in making inflammatory comments about other disciplines than in providing solutions to the problems of the modern university. And the affirmation of Archie Bunker’s views of his son-in-law seems strange considering Bunker’s conservative and inflammatory viewpoints.

The second putdown came in the opening to a piece about the spelling bee in the Washington Post:

The National Spelling Bee, now underway — or it it weigh? — is a hilarious concept. What better way to announce to the world at large that you have a totally useless and unmarketable skill — besides, I guess, framing your sociology degree? You’re a world-champion speller, eh? Do you also play the mountain dulcimer? That might have more practical applications in the workforce.

I’m guessing this is supposed to be facetious but still, it suggests a sociology degree is akin to having a “totally useless and unmarketable skill.”

Perhaps this is all part of the larger discussion about the value of college and getting a job but I suspect there will be many more opinions thrown out there about certain disciplines and sociology in particular. It looks like sociologists should continue to think about how to best describe the value of sociology for both our students and the broader world.

Even Shakespeare doesn’t like McMansions

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As the debate over the value of certain college majors continues, William Shakespeare responds and defends the liberal arts and also knocks McMansions:

See, when I wrote all those plays back in the day, I had no intention of helping the bright-eyed brats of the future find their way to high-paying jobs and McMansions in the ’burbs. No, I was after something else altogether. (If you don’t understand this, please do not feel alone; this great stage of fools is plenty crowded.) To be sure, one should not attempt to mine A Midsummer Night’s Dream for literal fortune, unless, of course, you’re in the tights-and-tunics trade. But that’s another matter…

Students can do worse than to take literature courses, like ones devoted to my work, or to that of Toni Morrison, or even to depressing saps like Melville. To study literature is to practice critical thinking; to write about texts is to hone writing skills. The very things that the masters of industry demand in their employees, no?

Shakespeare seems to have heard the selling points for a liberal arts education.

The phrase that interests me: “the bright-eyed brats of the future find their way to high-paying jobs and McMansions in the ’burbs.” This seems to be a broad indictment of how students (and others?) view college: it is about making money and living comfortably as one pursues the American dream. In contrast, the liberal arts promotes thinking and wrestling with the big questions that humans have sought to answer throughout history. But do McMansions and critical thinking have to be mutually exclusive? McMansion seems to refer here more to the homeowners themselves who are only interested in making money, getting ahead, and enjoying life. Is the opposite implication that critical thinkers would never purchase or build a McMansion because they would see its faults? Do critical thinkers (and liberal arts majors) only live in homes with character and history in the city?

Getting better data on how students use laptops in class: spy on them

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Professors like to talk about how students use laptops in the classroom. Two recent studies shed some new light on this issue and they are unique in how they obtained the data: they spied on students.

Still, there is one notable consistency that spans the literature on laptops in class: most researchers obtained their data by surveying students and professors.

The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.

In one study, a St. John’s University law professor hired research assistants to peek over students’ shoulders from the back of the lecture hall. In the other, a pair of University of Vermont business professors used computer spyware to monitor their students’ browsing activities during lectures.

The authors of both papers acknowledged that their respective studies had plenty of flaws (including possibly understating the extent of non-class use). But they also suggested that neither sweeping bans nor unalloyed permissions reflect the nuances of how laptops affect student behavior in class. And by contrasting data collected through surveys with data obtained through more sophisticated means, the Vermont professors also show why professors should be skeptical of previous studies that rely on self-reporting from students — which is to say, most of them.

While these studies might be useful for dealing with the growing use of laptops in classrooms, discussing the data itself would be interesting. A few questions come to mind:

1. What discussions took place with an IRB? It seems that this might have been a problem in the study using spyware on student computers and this was reflected in the generalizability of the data with just 46% of students agreeing to have the spyware on their computer. The other study also could run into issues if students were identifiable. (Just a thought: could a professor insist on spyware being on student computers if the students insisted on having a laptop in class?)

2. These studies get at the disparities between self-reported data and other forms of data collection. I would guess that students would underestimate their distractable laptop use on self-reported surveys because they would suspect that this is the answer that they should give (social desirability bias). But it could also reveal things about how cognizant computer/Internet users are about how many windows and applications they actually cycle through.

3. Both of these studies are on a relatively small scale: one had 45 students, the other had a little more than 1,000 but the data was “less precise” since it involved TAs sitting in the back monitoring students. Expanding the Vermont study and linking laptop use to outcomes on a larger scale is even better: move beyond just talking about the classroom experience and look at its impact on learning outcomes. Why doesn’t someone do this on a larger scale and in multiple settings? Would it be too difficult to get past some of the IRB issues?

In looking at the comments about this story, it seems like having better data on this topic would go a long ways to moving the discussion beyond anecdotal evidence.

Finding community at the office

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In a new economy where workers are “free agents” or “portfolio workers” among a relatively high unemployment landscape (at least in the United States), could workers be missing community life at work as well as the regular paycheck?

In the late 1990s the world of work moved away from security and towards freedom.

A job for life was out. Work became splintered, spliced and diced: contract, sub-contract and casual labour, part-time, sessional and seasonal, project-based, freelance and temp work emerged, as the frequencies and rhythms of work became subject to the vagaries of the economy.

Richard Sennett, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, described it as ”new economy” work – the work of flexible capitalism where ”workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take risks continually”…

The experience of being a highly mobile new economy worker is as Sennett says: being continuously exposed to risk can eat away at your sense of character. You are always ”starting over”. And just like your employment, your witnesses are not long-term. The writer Karen Blixen (better known by her pen name, Isak Dinesen) used this line for one of her characters: ”I was constantly in flight, an exile everywhere.”

Sometimes flight cannot be helped. But community helps stave off the feeling of being exiled, of drift.

Some interesting thoughts here. As I have talked to college students, the new economy jobs are what they want: they want to be able to use their skills, to flourish (which may be different than being happy), and to be able to set their own pace and priorities. Of course, these goals can be difficult for many to obtain in the early years after college. Additionally, many of them do want to find a community to be a part of, a place where they can fit into and still be somewhat autonomous. So perhaps this commentary is really about a larger issue: how do modern people who seek after individualistic goals also find enough community so that they don’t become alienated from society? And are there groups or companies that do this better than others?

This reminds me of what one might hear from college faculty: the job of a professor offers a balance between these two goals. We enjoy our jobs because it offers freedom (to study what we want, to have some say over our own schedules) but also places us within an academic context that runs on a very predictable calendar with regular interaction with others.

The commentary also notes the role technology can play: we can be apart from others but are seemingly connected through devices like cell phones or platforms like Facebook. But these seem less like “true” community and more like community of our own choosing, calling whom we want or making “friends” with whom we want. This is quite different than what might go on in an office:

Yet there can be a joyous, awful, wonderful cacophony when you don’t get to choose – the possibility of a richer, messier, wider community; a mosaic of quirks, histories, personalities. Look around your office – they are all there.

This not getting to choose, however, seems to go against all modern sensibilities: it is one thing to put up with others but it is another to do this without any other options.

The quick reference to television show The Office is intriguing. Throughout the course of the show, there is little indication that the employees want to leave. At the same time, there are very few (if any?) moments where the workers make a conscious decision to stay because they really like the community of people there (versus liking one or two people). It is too bad we don’t see more of these characters given options where they could leave but they choose not to because they realize who they are living behind. Perhaps this is too much to ask: if workers are given brighter opportunities elsewhere (money, benefits, chance for advancement, etc.), perhaps they will always go for that over any community ties.

Rising debt for college loans better than debt for a McMansion

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The college Class of 2011 might expect more in life than simply to be known as “the most indebted ever“:

22,900: Average student debt of newly minted college graduates

The Class of 2011 will graduate this spring from America’s colleges and universities with a dubious distinction: the most indebted ever.

Even as the average U.S. household pares down its debts, the new degree-holders who represent the country’s best hope for future prosperity are headed in the opposite direction. With tuition rising at an annual rate of about 5% and cash-strapped parents less able to help, the mean student-debt burden at graduation will reach nearly $18,000 this year, estimates Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of student-aid websites Fastweb.com and FinAid.org. Together with loans parents take on to finance their children’s college educations — loans that the students often pay themselves – the estimate comes to about $22,900. That’s 8% more than last year and, in inflation-adjusted terms, 47% more than a decade ago.

In the long run, the investment is probably worth it. Education is a much better reason to borrow money than buying cars or McMansions, and it endows people with economic advantages that the recession and slow recovery have only accentuated. As of 2009, the annual pre-tax income of households headed by people with at least a college degree exceeded that of less-educated households by 101%, up from 91% in 2006. As of April, the unemployment rate among college graduates stood at 4.5%, compared to 9.7% for those with only a high-school diploma and 14.6% for those who never finished high school.

I am intrigued by the McMansion comparison here as it is used to illustrate the foolishness of overspending on a big or expensive house versus the possible “good debt” of college loans. Of course, this is all in economic terms as the education is expected to pay off down the road while McMansion purchases of the last 15 years are not expected to yield such great values in this poor housing market. (And using a car as a debt comparison seems a bit strange: a car is rarely an investment but rather a black hole for money.) But this view of a house, as an investment opportunity, is a relatively recent development.

There is something about this data that could warrant a closer look: while it appears that the average college student debt has increased, is the average really the best measure here? I would much rather see a distribution of college debt in order to better know whether this mean is heavily influenced by people with massive amounts of college debt. Here is a paragraph from a recent New York Times article regarding college loans:

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.

And here is some additional data from recent years that sheds more light on the distribution of college debt:

These figures were calculated using the data analysis system for the 2007-2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education. (For comparison, cumulative education debt statistics from the 2003-2004 NPSAS are also available.) The 2007-2008 NPSAS surveyed 114,000 undergraduate students and 14,000 graduate and professional students. These statistics are not necessarily available from published NPSAS reports.The median cumulative debt among graduating Bachelor’s degree recipients at 4-year undergraduate schools was $19,999 in 2007-08. One quarter borrowed $30,526 or more, and one tenth borrowed $44,668 or more. 9.5% of undergraduate students and 14.6% of undergraduate student borrowers graduating with a Bachelor’s degree graduated with $40,000 or more in cumulative debt in 2007-08. This compares with 6.4% and 10.0%, respectively, for Bachelor’s degree recipients graduating with $40,000 or more (2008 dollars) in cumulative debt in 2003-04.

This data provides a median that is somewhat similar to the two figures cited above. Based on these three figures and interpretations, it sounds like more college students are taking on debt rather than some students are taking on a lot more debt.