Posts
May 08, 2013
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I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors.Ferguson reiterates that his remarks were “stupid.” The question then arises: He’s a smart guy, how did he end up saying such stupid things? Ferguson has a history of saying high-profile stupid things, and they always seem to be when
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There's a growing campaign in the US to get universities to stop investing in fossil fuels. UK science should take noteYou might have read Naomi Klein on green investment in fossil fuels last week. She points a finger at NGOs who aren't checking whether their sometimes considerable endowments are being put to work in the same industries they campaign against. The context of this is not just that it makes parts of the environmental movement look a bit silly, but the growing disinvestment
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Recent controversies over honey bees remind us of their environmental and economic importance, but should also prompt us to reflect upon the structures of expertise we reply uponThe recent revival in controversies surrounding dying honey bees has brought global attention to issues farmers, beekeepers, politicians and environmental campaigners have long been aware of. Honey bees are in danger. Honey bees play a critical role in pollinating the crops people eat and, as such are both part of the
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May 07, 2013
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Syracuse University has a really strong athletic program, and one that generates significant revenue for the college.
But the university recently found a way to potentially make more revenue from sports. Syracuse decided to leave the Big East Conference for the Atlantic Coast Conference, because the Atlantic Coast Conference has a larger payout to sports teams with conference wins.
So far so good. But Syracuse's contract with the Big East means it has to pay a $7.5 million exit fee. Syracuse […]
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5:38 PM | Outsourcing College Grading
It looks like we can outsource anything. While college students might expect their work to be read by real professors (even if adjuncts or grad students) carefully scrutinizing their work, it turns out careful scrutiny is just getting too expensive.
And so, like so many credit card companies and telemarketers, colleges are sending student work to India. According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Houston director of business law and ethics studies Lori Whisenant […]
May 06, 2013
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The storm that’s slowly rolling toward Indianapolis quietly gained strength this week with the filing of several devastating documents in a federal court in California. If it stays on course, it’s going to hit with biblical force, reducing the National Collegiate Athletic Association to a heap of rubble. This storm is also known as O’Bannon v. NCAA. It’s an antitrust lawsuit filed in 2009 by former UCLA All-American basketball player Ed O’Bannon and a handful of
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History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports:
Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had
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May 05, 2013
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Our national science academy should not be cosying up to the royals - especially one with such a chequered pastThis should have been a great week for the Royal Society. On Friday, it unveiled the results of this year's election to its fellowship, the most prestigious honour (short of a Nobel Prize) that any scientist can aspire to. After criticism last year over the low number of fellowships awarded to women (just two out of forty-four), the line-up in 2013 was a lot more encouraging, with a
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May 03, 2013
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9:41 PM | The Low Information College Applicant
The competition for students is intense. Colleges need to seem really attractive in order to get new kids to sign up for their particular institution. So they engage in fancy marketing efforts. Glossy mailings. Disney-like campus tours. Targeted Youtube videos.
Yes, we know this looks like a lot of money, they say, but we offer “generous financial aid” (mostly in the form of loans) and it’s really an “investment” in your future (though we’re not going to […]
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7:14 PM | Financial Literacy Doesn’t Work
Colleges often propose a series of “financial literacy” courses to help students manage their debt, pay bills on time, and generally be fiscally solvent adults, despite facing huge payments on college loans.
The University of South Carolina, for example, to address the average South Carolina borrower’s $21,157 of education debt, offers “counseling… a financial literacy program and altering the school’s University 101 course to include a section on financial […]
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Planning for the future predicted by our current data leaves us vulnerable to unexpected derailments. Embracing uncertainty and preparing for the implausible gives us the chance to choose a better worldPrediction can feel like shining a torch forward into the terrifying, dark unknown. The narrower and more focused the beam, the brighter the light, and the more detail can be perceived – but only along that one thin pathway. The light may help you prepare for tricky patches ahead, but it cannot
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May 02, 2013
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8:30 PM | The Coming Backlash on Education Reform
For the last decade or so education reform, whether pushed by Democrats or Republicans, has been focused on standardized-test based accountability. We will fix education by testing students and then instituting sanctions when schools fail to improve their scores on standardized tests. Teachers will be evaluated (and fired or given bonuses) based on their ability to improve standardized test scores. Schools will be reformed (or closed) based similarly on test results.
Despite opposition from […]
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7:34 PM | Bully Policy
Perhaps due to the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi back in 2010 (after unwittingly being filmed by another student in his dorm room with another man) the United States is now trying to address bullying in schools.
But could policy fix this problem? Is this a solvable problem?
The American Educational Research Association recently published a comprehensive paper on bullying in America, “Prevention of Bullying in Schools, Colleges, and Universities.”
The report is […]
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That’s Dave Weigel’s pessimistic conclusion here. About social scientists, Weigel says:
…it’s difficult for them to justify their own funding in a time of severe government cutbacks. Since March 1, when Congress and the president failed to replace sequestration with anything less idiotic, the human faces of austerity have included children whose Head Start programs are being cut, older people who are going without Meals on Wheels, and—less
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May 01, 2013
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7:11 PM | Gay FAFSA
The Department of Education has made some changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the form students fill out to determine their eligibility for financial aid. Starting next year the department will,
collect income and other information from a dependent student's legal parents regardless of the parents' marital status or gender, if those parents live together.
The 2014-2015… FAFSA, will provide a new option for dependent applicants to describe their parents'
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5:06 PM | Science, ethics and shared space
If we want innovation to be more responsible, does it make sense to separate the people who think about innovation from those that think about responsibility?"We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour. The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles." – Hans Monderman People spilling out of the Science Museum or Imperial College London may have noticed over the last couple of years how much easier it has become to get run
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Everyone, from President Barack Obama to U.S. Representative Paul Ryan to Bill Gates, seems to have an idea for improving the Federal Pell Grant Program for higher education. Worthy though some of these efforts may be, none reveals the crux of the problem: A huge proportion of this $40 billion annual federal investment is flowing to people who simply aren’t prepared to do college-level work. And this is perverting higher education’s mission, suppressing completion rates and warping
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Hobsbawm said that with the democratisation of politics, power increasingly became theatre. We've taken him at his wordWhen we announced that our new initiative to re-think UK agri-food research policy would use drama as a core design feature, several of my colleagues in the science policy community responded with a mixture of humour and horror. A friend at a prominent environmental NGO said he feared his director would find such an approach "cringe-worthy". A professor of social science told
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A May Day event inspired by LSE research invites us to think about the licensing of academic impact.This evening at 6pm, the Space Hijackers will be launching an Emergent Service Workers Party. You might remember the Space Hijackers as the "Official Protestors" of the Olympics, their midnight City cricket games or the time they took a tank to an arms fair. I have no idea what they're planning, just that they promise "A political party in the truest sense of the word!"Whatever happens, I wonder
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April 30, 2013
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10:36 PM | How Cooper Union Gave Up
Cooper Union, the New York college that had been free for more than 100 years, will now require that its students pay tuition. This development is unfortunate, for sure, but often commentary on the Cooper Union problem (including that appearing in the College Guide) has treated the tuition as if it were a the result of inevitable forces related to the rising cost of education.
That might be part of it, but Cooper Union has always been exceptional, and always operated very differently from […]
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Students First, the controversial education organization founded by former Washington, DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, last year named as its “reformer of the year” Republican Tennessee state Rep. John Ragan (right). Ragan was a winner due to his,
support of several education policies for which we advocate. For example, he supported an overhaul to Tennessee’s outdated teacher tenure system, cast an important vote to end arbitrary limits on the number of charter schools
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Sir Mark Walport is no corporate stooge. The lesson to take from George Monbiot's broadside is to leave advocacy to advocatesGeorge Monbiot pulled no punches in his piece yesterday on Sir Mark Walport, the newly appointed UK government chief scientific adviser (GCSA). Responding to Walport's recent Financial Times article on bees and neonicotinoid pesticides, Monbiot accused him of writing a "concatenation of gibberish", and of deploying "the kind of groundless moral blackmail frequently used
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April 29, 2013
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For-profit colleges are very direct about why you should consider attendance: A college degree brings you more money. “We’re committed to your success” says the University of Phoenix. “Advance your career” commands Capella University. Rasmussen College is even more specific: “Earn Your Degree To Achieve The Career You Want.”
Good luck with that. Here’s why many proprietary colleges might really be considered scams: Going there doesn’t […]
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That’s according to a opinion piece at CATO. NCLB, George W. Bush’s signature education initiative, was designed to spur achievement by requiring schools to use standardized testing and instituting sanctions in schools that performed poorly overall (and in subgroups).
At the dedication of George W. Bush’s presidential library President Barack Obama even praised Bush for NCLB, saying that his initiative helped “reform our schools in ways that help every child learn, not […]
April 26, 2013
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Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of A Nation at Risk, the seminal 1983 report that warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity in the nation’s schools.” American students were underperforming relative to other developed nations, the piece warned.
In the 30 years since A Nation at Risk we’ve made extensive changes to education policy. Standards based reform. Pay for performance. No Child Left Behind. Race to the Top. More testing. More evaluation. […]
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Via Scott Aaronson, Congressional pushback against NSF funding has expanded past the social sciences.
Yesterday, over the course of two contentious hearings, the new chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology floated the idea of having every NSF grant application include a statement of how the research, if funded, “would directly benefit the American people.” Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) said that he was not trying to
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12:12 AM | The First SAT
The SAT has changed a great deal in the last 90 years. Smithsonian has thankfully published a copy of the first SAT, issued in 1926. Interested in archaic terms? Foreign word association? How about story problems related to your smoking habit?
Standardized tests were a lot different in 1926.
Back then the Scholastic Aptitude Test (which was actually called that, no acronym yet) consisted of 315 questions in nine subjects. Students had 97 minutes to answer the questions.
And oh, what […]
April 25, 2013
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3:58 PM | A very Wellcome appointment
The Wellcome Trust is now one of the most powerful players in British and international science. What can we expect from its incoming director?April has brought with it a mini-reshuffle of some of the biggest jobs in British science. Three weeks into his new role, Sir Mark Walport is already stamping his mark on the Government Office for Science. Imran Khan has traded the cramped but energetic office of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) for a plusher berth at the British Science
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April 24, 2013
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The big trend in higher education improvement lately is the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to students across the country. MOOCs, classes designed for large-scale participation and open access via the Internet, have been hailed by pundits as a development that will “unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course.”
The […]
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Or is he just a sick figment of Glenn Beck’s twisted imagination, in which “leftists” hate America and root for the people who kill Americans?
As faithful readers will know, I demonstrated years ago that there is no such person as “Governor Sarah Palin”; she’s just a Tina Fey character. Surely the same must be true of “Professor Richard Falk.”Not only would an actual Princeton IR professor who had peddled the Ayatollah Khomeini to the American
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