Posts
June 18, 2013
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A new feature on U.S. News & World Report rates America’s teacher preparation programs. Surprise, they’re all pretty bad.
Together with the National Council on Teacher Quality, the publication has revealed its new rankings. Read it and weep.
While the 2013 teacher preparation rankings begins by informing interested parties that “with NCTQ's ratings of teacher prep programs, you can find the one that will get you classroom-ready from day one,” it actually does no such […]
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Image credit - Devin Castles
More Americans than ever are completing college, but blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans and men are falling behind.
A new study by the Lumina Foundation (using the most recent data available from 2011) finds that 38.7% of working-age Americans (ages 25-64) now have a post-secondary degree, up .4% from 2010. But among blacks, Hispanics and men, the rates of educational attainment are much lower. While 59.1% of Asians and 43.3% of whites have a post-secondary
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As parents and students struggle to keep up with rising college tuition and take on greater burdens of debt, universities are being challenged to justify the ballooning athletic fees they tack on to the bill. In the 2010-11 academic year, the 227 public institutions in Division 1 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association collected more than $2 billion in athletic fees from their students -- or an average of more than $500 per enrollee -- according to research by Jeff Smith at the
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June 17, 2013
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8:21 PM | "Colllege" Baseball
The College World Series, while not nearly as popular as America’s basketball playoffs or its football bowl games, is a pretty big idea. The culmination of the NCAA Division I baseball championship occurs annually for a week and a half in June in Omaha, Nebraska.
It’s a highly choreographed endeavor, often looking rather like professional baseball.
Well, except sometimes. Here's the home dugout.
That’s right, colllege.
Workers corrected the error on Saturday.
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6:48 PM | The Professors Aren’t Retiring
One of the lines frequently used, at least in past years, to reassure those contemplating an academic profession, is that one should not worry too much about the lack of open tenure-track professor jobs . Many professors are old; eventually they’ve got to retire.
Eventually, yes, but not anytime soon. According to a piece at Inside Higher Ed based on a recent Fidelity Investments study of college faculty:
Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or
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4:34 PM | Why Parents Pay So Much for College
A friend of mine was feeling very ready to retire in his 60s after a long, demanding career. I was thus surprised when he told me over lunch that he was in some distress about his plans to stand down.Him: “Our last child, our daughter, is 17 and surprised us a few months ago by wanting to go to an expensive private college. She has her heart set on it. We have enough money saved for a state school but can’t afford this place unless I put off retirement and take a second
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June 14, 2013
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How’s technology being implemented in schools? Is it working?
Despite some 25 years worth of technology-in-schools enthusiasm, we really have no idea if it’s working. That’s one of the takeaways from a new study about technology in elementary and secondary schools recently conducted by Center for American Progress.
According to a piece by Motoko Rich in the New York Times:
With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other
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Who says college doesn’t teach real-world skills?
Are you a journalist worried if your publication will survive, given the changing nature of the industry? It turns out there’s college preparation for that, too.
Many of the problems faced by real publications—declining advertising revenue and confusion about where to focus efforts in a changing world of journalism—are problems for college newspapers, too.
According to a piece at Poynter:
In an era of changing media
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June 13, 2013
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6:00 PM | Reviewing Fraudulent Research
Academic misconduct or, in layman’s terms, fraudulent research, is very serious offense, but it’s one that’s often hard to detect (particularly because most academic research, some 1.5 million new articles a year, is rarely read at all) but now there might be a way to speed up the process of cracking down on the problem.
Ladies and gentlemen, check out http://integru.org/, a Romanian-based website that encourages scholars to send in research that they think is fishy. Then […]
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One of the Supreme Court decisions education policy analysts are awaiting is the one on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case in which two white women are suing Texas’s flagship university, arguing that the school’s affirmative action program—and therefor their rejection for admission—constitutes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case has important implications for affirmative action in college admissions but, as Ben […]
June 12, 2013
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5:54 PM | Americans Opposed to Affirmative Action
In anticipation of the coming Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which two white women are suing Texas’s flagship university, arguing that the school’s affirmative action program—and therefor their rejection for admission—constitutes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Washington Post-ABC News conducted a poll of how Americans feel about race in admissions. They don’t like it.
According to the
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Despite extensive hype about the future of online education, most students prefer to continue to take real courses. According to an article by Devin Karambelas in USA Today:
Despite the rapid growth of online learning, many college students say they still prefer the traditional classroom setting.
According to results of a new national research study, 78% of more than 1,000 students surveyed still believe it is easier to learn in a classroom.
But you can’t always get what you want. […]
June 11, 2013
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6:48 PM | College Dropout Earn Less Than Graduates, But Still More Than Those Who Never Went to College
We often talk about college dropouts as if they just wasted money going to college. They took out all those loans an now they’re no better off, economically or professionally, than if they’d just stopped at high school, because they have no college degree.
That’s not really true. According to a recent study performed by the Hamilton Project, college dropouts still earn more than mere high school graduates. The Huffington Post explains:
It's easy to see why more struggled to
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4:14 PM | Why Don't Academics Write Clearly?
Post-doc writes in draft paper: “Conceptually, it seems reasonable to argue that bi-interactional similarity facilitates cohesion in incipient affiliates of Alcoholics Anonymous by triggering likeability and cohesion in self and observer, thereby infusing social and individual identity with a subjective sense of connection”.Me, scribbling note to post-doc in margin: “Does this mean that people like AA more if the people at the meeting are like them? If so, why not just say
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June 10, 2013
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6:40 PM | Georgetown: Not Catholic Enough?
The author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, has filed a complaint with the archbishop of Washington, DC, because he doesn’t think that Georgetown University (above), his alma mater, is being Catholic enough.
According to an article in the Washington Post:
The author says that Georgetown has violated church teaching for decades by inviting speakers who support abortion rights and refusing to obey instructions the late Pope John Paul II issued in 1990 to church-affiliated colleges
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It turns out that people who take classes using an MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) format do better when they also get outside help offline.
According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
For online learners who took the first session of “Circuits & Electronics,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or “someone who teaches or has expertise” in the subject did better
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June 07, 2013
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The average American who takes out loans to attend college faces some $27,000 o debt upon graduation. Student loan debt has quadrupled in the last decade. A lot of this increase surely has to do with the high and escalating cost of college—in America we expect students and parents themselves make significant contributions to pay for college.
In Sweden, however, college is free. Totally free, up to the PhD level. Institutions charge students no fees at all. And yet, according to an
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June 06, 2013
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The New York Times reports that the United Negro College Fund, the American foundation that since 1944 has funded scholarships for black students and supported America’s 39 private historically black colleges and universities, will change its motto.
Since 1972 it’s used the widely recognized "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." Now, according the Times article, it’s going to go with “A mind is a terrible thing to waste but a wonderful thing to invest in.” The […]
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We’ve long known that community college graduation numbers aren’t so good, but a recent report makes the true picture pretty clear, and disturbing.
According to a paper published by the Century Foundation, the vast majority of community college students (81 percent) plan to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Just 11.6 percent of them do, however.
We often talk about community college success in terms of time. It takes the average community college student five years to complete a […]
June 05, 2013
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Ohio State University President Gordon Gee, the academic administrator Time magazine recently named America’s best college president, has abruptly retired.
This comes after a very awkward incident in which Gee, meeting with Ohio State’s athletic council, joked that Notre Dame wasn’t invited to be a member of the Big Ten because the university's priests “are not good partners.” According to an Associated Press piece at ESPN:
"The fathers are holy on Sunday, and
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4:59 PM | Florida's Optional Remediation
Remediation, the courses many students take in college to get them “prepared” for credit-bearing courses, are a problem. Some 34 percent of students in public colleges take remedial courses. But taking a remedial courses actually makes a student less likely to graduate from college. There’s also significant evidence that many college students forced to take remedial courses due to standardized test scores may be perfectly capable of succeeding without them.
Armed with this […]
June 04, 2013
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7:56 PM | The Porn Publication
The publishing company Routledge is introducing a new academic periodical, Porn Studies, a quarterly journal that will launch next spring. Many academics aren’t so happy with this.
PS will be,
The first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts. Porn Studies will publish innovative work examining specifically
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Last week I wrote about President Barack Obama’s annual fight with Congress over the interest rate on government-backed student loans.
Obama has one plan. Congressional Republicans (Reps. John Kline (R-Minn.) and Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.)) have another. And Senator Elizabeth Warren has a third. There are other plans floating around developed by both Republicans (Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.)) and Democrats (Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Dick Durbin's (D-Ill.)) in the […]
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6:49 PM | What Is Education “Reform” Really About?
The education strategies pursued by many policymakers in the last decade, focused on high stakes testing and sanctions based on low performance on standardized tests, are controversial. Critics argue that such strategies are cruel and likely to prove ineffective given persistent poverty in America. But what’s the motivation behind such efforts?
According to a piece by David Sirota at Salon:
In the great American debate over education, the education and technology corporations,
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June 03, 2013
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Canadian universities, hoping to take advantage of growing concern over high tuition in the United States, are looking to recruit south of the border.
According to an article in the Globe and Mail:
Betting that cost is the main barrier, the University of Windsor is creating a “U.S. neighbour fee” that will charge undergraduates from the United States $10,000 per year - up to $10,000 less than what international students currently pay. The hope is that the university will nab some
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5:25 PM | Paterno Family Sues NCAA
The heirs of Joe Paterno, the late Pennsylvania State University head football coach, are apparently suing the National Collegiate Athletic Association over sanctions the NCAA issued on Penn State due to the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal last year.
According to an Associated Press article in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Paterno family lawyer Wick Sollers says the 40-page suit… will question decisions made by the NCAA leadership in levying penalties that include a four-year bowl ban
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May 31, 2013
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This morning President Obama, in the administration’s annual performance of don’t-change-the-interest-rate-on-student-loans, urged college students to call their Congressional representatives and urge them to keep the interest rate on federally-backed education loans at 3.4 percent.
According to a Huffington Post piece:
President Barack Obama on Friday stepped into the hyper-partisan fight over student debt, warning about the economic dangers posed by rising debt burdens and
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May 30, 2013
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11:23 PM | A New MOOC Business Plan
Coursera, the company that provides many massive open online courses (MOOCs) to colleges, is apparently changing its business strategy.
The way it used to work was that Coursera would offer students free, online versions of courses taught by professors at elite colleges. The students wouldn’t get academic credit from these institutions but they would potentially get the advantage of the high-quality courses. The company wasn’t really sure how to make money off of the free courses, […]
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8:02 PM | Harvard's Flak Army
We’ve written before at the Monthly about the vast proliferation of administrative staff at American universities in the last 20 years.
Employment of academic administrators has increased 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty. As Benjamin Ginsberg wrote in this magazine two years ago, this development is very troublesome for academia because it vastly increases costs, and also he’s not really sure what all of these people do all day to […]
May 29, 2013
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The sequester continues to bring on its slow destruction of American public institutions.
According to an analysis by the New America Foundation:
Last week, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee circulated a proposal that would shift fiscal year 2014 funding from health care, job training, and education programs to military and national security programs. (Fiscal year 2014 starts October 1, 2013.) Just how big of a hit does that mean for education programs? Put it this way, the
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