Friday, November 30. 2007
We do not believe that the best liberal arts educations are necessarily at the most competitive colleges, but we do tend to believe that the smartest kids will be your competitors and colleagues at the most competitive colleges. WSJ ranks high schools by college admissions.
Tuesday, November 27. 2007
Race, IQ, and Education, a quote: One year ago, I wrote about the attempt to send more children to college, instead of dealing with students as individuals. I will not repeat that rant here. But this is another example of how the education establishment wants more money in reward for its failures. Overall, I think that to do education properly, we need to take into account individual differences of ability. I do not think we should pay attention to race. Too much of our education policy seems to be driven by the opposite--we focus on outcomes in terms of race and leave the individual children behind.
And from his 2006 piece he links, Education and Entrepreneurship in which he refers to Wizard of Oz diplomas, a quote: I fear that many of the students who pass will go on to earn Wizard-of-Oz diplomas, which signify nothing. Students will claim to be educated, but employers will know otherwise. The phenomenon of the Wizard-of-Oz diploma has discredited the college degree. My oldest daughter discovered that her degree qualified her for secretarial positions. She soon decided to try law school instead. As her experience illustrates, although the average salary differential between college graduates and non-graduates remains high, the marginal college graduate is earning little or no premium.
Sunday, November 25. 2007
From a piece of the above title at Overcoming Bias (h/t, Flares for introducing me to that site), a quote: "It seems to me that there's a substantial advantage in knowing the drop-dead basic fundamental embarrassingly simple mathematics in as many different subjects as you can manage. Not, necessarily, the high-falutin' complicated damn math that appears in the latest journal articles. Not unless you plan to become a professional in the field. But for people who can read calculus, and sometimes just plain algebra, the drop-dead basic mathematics of a field may not take that long to learn. And it's likely to change your outlook on life more than the math-free popularizations or the highly technical math."
Wednesday, November 21. 2007
From a NYT piece on the NEA report on reading that we linked yesterday: ...Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.
and Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.
I guess this is new news: kids who have parents who like to learn also like to learn, but it's a crisis now. I blame global warming. As a solution to the Reading Crisis, I suggest a $1 billion Federal education program called "Books Are Fun!," a fun-filled, interactive, fast-moving multi-media curriculum-enhancement module ("MMCEM"), to be designed by leading expert reading consultants from teaching colleges and then introduced into every Middle School "curriculum" by Federal law. Approximately 40,000 new union-certified "Books are Fun!" specialists will be hired to guide schools through the application of this exciting new kid-friendly program through every course of study. Crisis solved! 
Friday, November 16. 2007
 Columbia capitulates to hunger strikers. Utterly pathetic and shameful. Were I Pres. of Columbia, I would have expelled them and had the cops carry them off campus, to re-apply if and when they decided to grow up.
Perhaps this is about Columbia's "effete moral gymnastics." I have an idea: Let's get 100 alumni donors like me to hold a hunger strike in front of Butler, to protest Columbia's endlessly-exasperating PC weeniness, and see what happens after we call the press to watch. Heck, it could be fun, like the '60s. Plenty of lite beer, and a band - maybe we could get my old college pals from Sha Na Na to play. (They were/are good guys, and good students too.) I could afford to lose a few pounds for a good cause - for the sanity of Alma Mater, from whom I have two degrees from the pre-psychotic era. (thanks, Opie, for alerting me to this depressing story.) Also, The Corner on the subject. h/t, BL
Wednesday, October 24. 2007
Tom Brewton quotes Derek Bok in a piece on Sowell on Education - Substance vs. Perception: ...former Harvard University President Derek Bok wrote, Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.
Friday, October 19. 2007
Tuitions rise while endowments swell. As we have noted in the past, higher education institutions are now investment organizations with annoyingly high overhead (faculty, students, buildings, sports facilities, etc). If they could just dump that overhead, they might be pretty good businesses. It might not hurt to just keep the football and basketball teams, though, for fresh cash flow. The situation reminds me of the time, about 20 years ago, when ski areas woke up and realized that they were actually real estate businesses.
Tuesday, October 16. 2007
 The link to Assistant Village Idiot's piece on signaling and politics, in which he proposes, just for the sake of discussion:
Let’s pretend for purpose of discussion that all our religious, political, and social beliefs are entirely hollow. They have no intellectual content to speak of, and are mere social signals. We use them as birds use song, marking territory, calling attention to ourselves, attracting mates. We use a particular vocabulary of values to keep some people away and draw others in, to attempt to assign ourselves a certain status in the world.
Bumper stickers, what is displayed in your office, and choice of avatars are essentially just social signaling.
I decided to try to learn just a little about Signaling Theory, but first I had to make sure the word didn't have two "l"s, so as to avoid signaling that I am a dunce. (It's one of those many words that the Brits spell wrong.) Moving ahead, I learned that the sociological/economic/game theory notion of signaling comes out of biology and animal behavior. I found a good introductory piece on the subject, Honest Signalling Theory (I noted that this American Bio prof likes to use two "l"s.) It's an interesting multi-page piece which begins: The gazelle's leaping behavior, the nestlings' begging, the expensive suit - all of these things are signals. All are intended to convey information about a signaller, to a signal receiver. For humans, the fancy suit - like a fast car, an expensive bottle of wine, or a precious gemstone - indicates some property or quality of the signaller. In this case, that property might be the relative wealth of an individual.
I realized that maybe I do more signalling than I would like to think. Then I stumbled into a piece by Econlog's Caplan after reading some brief essays about education and signaling (Would you rather have a Berkley Diploma and No Education, or Education and No Diploma? and Jane Galt's Who are we signalling? and Tyler Cowen's Why Education is Productive - a parable of men and beasts) about the signaling value of education. Is education purely about social signalling? Of course not, but partially, yes. Caplan, in Mixed Signals asks: Which would do more for your career: A Princeton education, but no diploma, or a Princeton diploma, but no education? All my personal experience (30 years in school!) tells me that there is a lot of truth in the signaling model. I don't use most of my schooling in my job, and I'm a professor, for God's sake! But would I have my current position if I had failed high school Spanish? No way.
Well, this was all fun, but one is quickly reminded of how often people who have cool ideas tend to get reductionistic about them: Man is all about economics, man is all about gender, man is all about libido, man is all about adapting to his environment, man is all about signaling, etc, etc. So if you look at the world through a "signaling" lens, all you will see is signaling. And now I am out of time and getting too long anyway.
Monday, September 24. 2007
I learned about a fine New England liberal arts college today - one of which I had never heard. St. Michael's. Its proximity to Stowe is just an extra.
 A quote from the Columbia Spectator (h/t, Minding the Campus):
In the 1930s, the Columbia administration participated in what could be described as the coddling of the Nazi regime. In 1933, Nazi ambassador Hans Luther gave a speech on campus in which, according to a 2006 article in Spectator by Rafeal Medoff, he focused on Hitler’s “peaceful intentions” in Europe. Columbia maintained student exchange programs with Nazi universities throughout the ’30s, while, in 1936, our university sent a representative to the 550th anniversary celebration of the University of Heidelberg, even though, writes Medoff, it had “already had been purged of Jewish faculty members, instituted a Nazi curriculum, and hosted a burning of books by Jewish authors.”
Read the whole piece, which I feel is rather unfair. Columbia is hardly an anti-semitic institution. The failure is one of discrimination - of being unwilling to decide what is good and what is bad, or, as our NJ says, "what is worthy and what is not"... or, worse, in actually declaring that one thing - ignorant murderous scum - is worth welcoming into your home, but another (ROTC and campus recruiting) is not. In modern academia, Columbia is hardly unique in these failures of conscience, decency, honor, and vigorous adult judgement. Columbia is, in fact, an amazing place, but not so much so that the administration is immunized from Pomo Psychosis: they may even still believe that it is the "advanced" way of thinking. My message to Columbia today: Grow a pair, and stand for something. My old Mater has embarrassed me.
Thursday, September 20. 2007
Perhaps I spoke too soon when I wrote about Andrew Meyer, AKA Captain Fantastic the Don't-Tase-Me-Bro Cowboy the other day: No one anything like the people that were forced to choose between letting him carry on like the jerk he manifestly is, or removing him from the premises, will ever be heard from.
Jack Dunphy, the nom de plume of a policeman who works in Los Angeles, then writes it down for National Review, proves me wrong with a blast of reality from the trenches: There is an axiom in police work that goes something like this: If you have a lawful reason for wanting someone to behave in a certain way, first you ask him, then you tell him, then you make him. In the case of Andrew “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” Meyer, the man now enjoying the waning moments of his Warholian fifteen minutes, the asking and the telling came up shy of the mark for the cops, thus bringing on the making. And the Tasing.
Read it.
Wednesday, September 19. 2007
A quote from Students know less after 4 years of college: Harvard gets D+ on civics quiz, in the NY Sun: Students at many of the country's most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy. According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and universities polled did not earn a passing grade. "At the most expensive colleges, they actually graduate knowing less," the executive director of the Jack Miller Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Michael Ratliff, said. "Colleges and universities are not directing students to the courses that would educate them. We want to know whether after getting $300 billion to do their work, universities are actually educating their students."
Indeed. I have noticed this myself.
Tuesday, September 18. 2007
 There's been plenty of discussion about the student in Florida who was physically removed from a speech being given by John Kerry. You can see an excellent round-up of reaction to it here on Pajamas Media.
I'm sure if you read all those takes on it, you might think there's a wide range of opinion. I don't. I see one kind of opinion about it. It's the opinion that's shared by the nattering classes in everything. It's the point of view of the narcissistic attention-whoring college student. No one anything like the people that were forced to choose between letting him carry on like the jerk he manifestly is or removing him from the premises will ever be heard from.
The essential thing I saw, completely overlooked by all opinion makers I read, was this young fellow's attitude toward the people who were trying to get him to comply. They were nothing to him. But then again, they are nothing to all the commenters, too. Some people applauded what they did; some excoriated what they did; but in all cases the attitude is one of deciding how well the little people did performing some menial task that was their lot. It all felt like deciding to tip a servant or not.
It's funny --a little-- that the reason this guy was yelling at John Kerry was that he was angry that Kerry wasn't angry enough; wasn't nearly as angry as him. How dare he not share his rage. He was angry, ultimately, that democracy meant that he might be forced to submit to the will of people that exist only as an abstraction; to be discussed politically, or as proles to be ordered around. He doesn't believe for one minute that John Kerry really won that election. He's angry that John Kerry refuses to use the pretexts he can cite chapter and verse to overthrow the government, with some semblance of cover-our-ass due process, and put the little people, and their wishes that rankle him so, back down where they belong. And he was very angry that people that he ranks with all the serfs would remind him of his responsibilities as a member of polite society, by daring to interrupt him and trying to remove him from the scene of his triumph. He's going to argue with a Senator. You think he's going to let some glorified mall cops tell him what to do? They dress in polyester, for Christ sakes.
Continue reading "Do You Know Who I Am?"
Monday, September 10. 2007
It's about time. Those rankings turn college "quality" into a dumb horse race, entirely overlooking what might be the best schools for a given kid. Schools have identities and a wide variety of different strengths and weaknesses, none of which can be captured in a ranking any more than you can rank individual people on overall "quality."
Saturday, September 8. 2007
Video: wisdom from Conan O'Brien, at Stuyvesant, 2006 graduation. h/t, Mankiw. For those unfamiliar with NYC, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are NYC's premier and highly-competitive (to get into, and to stay in) public high schools.
Thursday, September 6. 2007
 Almost everybody knows that Dartmouth College offers the best undergraduate education in the world. If Dartmouth is a bit of a cult, it is for good reason.
Alumni do not wear Dartmouth as a badge - they just care and stay involved and give money, and stop by whenever they can. Some of them decide to run for the elected alum trustee spots, and that is where the excitement began. The excitement began because the folks who have been winning these trustee elections (voted for by the entire body of Dartmouth alumni) have been more independent-minded, more tradition-minded, and generally if not entirely more conservative than in the past. The administration and the non-elected board aren't happy with that. Like any organization, they want support from the board, not trouble and intrusiveness. It's an Indian uprising. The administration and its allies are fighting back by trying to eliminate alumni voting. Interestingly, a number of major-league bloggers are Dartmouth folks. They keep the campus political issues in the public eye, which is good for the future of the school. Most schools are run as fiefdoms, shutting out the views of the alums who support them. When alums have a voice, they use it. It's a shame more schools don't have a powerful alumni presence among their trustees. Opinion Journal has a good summary of the history of Dartmouth's governance. Trustee T. J. Rogers wants to stay involved, and finds himself up against a totalitarian mentality. The alums won't put up with that. Joe's Dartblog is always on the story. Image: The now officially banned (God knows why) Dartmouth Indian. That image derives from Dartmouth's 1769 founding as a mission school to Indians, hence the school's motto "Vox clematis in deserto."
Sunday, September 2. 2007
iTunes U looks to become a bit of competition for The Teaching Company. Check out their download offerings, which I suspect will be growing quickly. h/t, reader. Our readers like to keep learning.
Friday, August 24. 2007
Did I miss a memo? Sippican Why America commonly doesn't educate. Never Yet Melted Photo from Sippican, who I think will forgive the theft.
Tuesday, August 21. 2007
The News Junkie referred to academic blackballing this morning. Here's an excellent example of the academic McCarthyism that goes on today, from the NYT. (I hate to use the term "McCarthyism" because, although he was a crank, I am not convinced that Joe McCarthy was all that far off.) It's about Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a sex and gender researcher. Scientific debate is fine, but you are not supposed to use live ammo. When scientists begin using live ammo they have abandoned persuasion, so it makes you rightly doubt their confidence in their positions. By the way, we wrote about the Transgender thing here and here. At this point, I believe that there is more politics than science in the whole subject.
Thursday, August 16. 2007
Before the SAT, colleges gave their own achievement tests to see whether you were prepared. In 1926, the SAT was intended to be a "progressive", democratizing influence by testing your "aptitude" instead of your mastery of Latin, Greek, French, chemistry and trigonometry. At the time, the elite prep schools did the best job preparing kids for the elite colleges' requirements. Charles Murray on educational testing, college admissions, class and genes. He suggests dumping the SAT, but keeping the Achievement Tests. His discussion makes sense to me: a college ought to be able to state what they expect in terms of preparation. On the same subject, Ivy Leaguers take untimed SATs. ADD and dyslexia, ya know?
Saturday, August 11. 2007
Two years ago the separate $20 million gifts to Harvard and Georgetown for Middle Eastern Studies programs by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal sparked a short-lived focus on what such academic programs are doing. From a piece by John Miller at Students for Academic Freedom: Because Middle Eastern studies aspired to immediate relevance, it became vulnerable to mixing scholarship and activism, with combustible results. Many professors believed they should become activists for positive change, such as modernization in the Arab world -- a helpful concept, but perhaps a job best left to diplomats and nonprofit groups.
"A lot of what they do is just glorified advocacy journalism," says Rubin of AEI. To complicate matters, Middle Eastern studies isn't rooted in a traditional academic discipline. Like African-American studies and women's studies, it's an interdisciplinary response to dramatic events and social movements. Because of this, the field has a tendency to attract teachers and students with passionate political beliefs that can get in the way of objective research. Although several sub-fields of Middle Eastern studies have flourished, especially in early history, art and architecture, and a few other areas, these subjects are far removed from the modern strategic concerns that Middle Eastern studies might be able to address.
Read the whole thing. h/t, Minding the Campus
Friday, August 10. 2007
Aaron Hansom via Pajamas: I developed a unique skill during my brief career as an elementary school teacher in inner city Los Angeles: Within moments of entering a new classroom, I was able to glean which students had two parents living at home. It was really no great feat. The boys whose pants were falling down to their ankles and the girls wearing short skirts were almost always from single-parent homes. I could tell immediately after reprimanding them that they weren’t accustomed to hearing a male authoritarian voice. The girls would usually respond to me by rolling their eyes, while the boys would either kick the wall or march out of class. Even when they remained in class, these students didn’t learn much. After all, they weren’t in school to learn.
Read the whole thing.
Tuesday, August 7. 2007
We are interested in IQ at Maggie's Farm. I suspect that most of our readers are among the 10% that measures over 120. If yours is over 120, Charles Murray believes you need Special Education. (Sorry those links on the archived piece didn't work.)
Friday, July 13. 2007
 A reader directed us to a 1998 essay by Victor Davis Hansen and Joseph Heath, of the above title.
Classics is about dead. You object that the disappearance of a tiny world of cloistered professors is not intrinsically significant. Must you suffer once again through some petty turf-war between pampered PhDs, a mock-epic struggle of nocturnal creatures croaking and scratching at each other for their tiny pad on an evaporating pond, one final Battle of Frogs and Mice? Who cares? Yet every American should care. The demise of classics means more than the implosion of an inbred academic discipline, more than the disappearance of one more bookosaurus here and there. For chained to this sinking academic bureaucracy called classics are the ideas, the values, the vision of classical Greece and Rome. These are the ideas and values that have shaped and defined Western civilization, a vision of life that has ironically come under increasing attack here in the elite universities of the West just as its mutated form is metastasizing throughout the globe. Very few in America now know much about the origins of the West in ancient Greece -- and our citizens are moving further from the central philosophical and ethical tenets that are so necessary if we are to understand and manage the leisure, affluence and freedom of the West. This ignorance of Greek wisdom should be of crucial interest to every American -- not because the West is being supplanted by some global multiculturalism (as so many academics proclaim), but quite the opposite: because its institutions and material culture are now overwhelming the world. The Greeks -- and the Greeks alone -- bequeathed us constitutional government, individual rights, freedom of expression, an open economy, civilian control of the military, separation of religious and political authority, private property, free scientific inquiry and open dissent. And for better or worse, these are the things most on this earth now desire.
Read the whole thing. VDH and Heath wrote a book of the same title.
Wednesday, July 11. 2007
A reader pointed out that VDH emitted an excellent rant on education which, while more articulate and detailed than mine of last week, led in the same direction. Plus he was a prof for a long time, and I never was. All that I did was to pay the bills.
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