Fareed Zakaria:

The United States has high levels of education and a large percentage of its workers in adult learning and training programs, and it spends lots of money on all these activities. And yet, it does worse than many countries with few advantages and resources. (And no, it isn’t just because of immigrants. About half of the OECD countries now have a larger percentage of foreign-born adults than does the United States)

What we learn from this study is really just an extension of what we have discovered in the PISA results. The biggest force behind falling American rankings is not that the United States is doing things much worse but that other countries have caught up and are doing better. The U.S. system of education and training is inadequate in the new global environment.

And things show no signs of improving. The bipartisan backlash against the Common Core — a set of national standards agreed to by governors — is a tragic example. Parents raised on a culture of low standards and high self-esteem are outraged that the tests show that many American schools are not teaching their children enough. (The tests must be at fault because they know that their kids are brilliant!) Some liberals and teacher groups are upset with the emphasis on testing (though Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed the Common Core). And Republicans now oppose it — despite having championed it only a few years ago — largely because the Obama administration also backs the project.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Kids with dyslexia are among those most affected by poor reading instruction. The Children’s Dyslexia Centers around the country (there are three in Wisconsin) train tutors in the Orton-Gillingham approach and provide free tutoring to children. It’s a game-changer for these kids who have so much to offer. Here is a glimpse inside the CDC-Milwaukee. Other centers are in Madison and Eau Claire.

As wonderful as these centers are, it would be even more wonderful if they became unnecessary because classroom and special education teachers, reading teachers, and reading specialists were trained to effectively teach all children to read. ​

Laurie Rogers:

Problem # 1. The number of useless administrators varied inversely with the number of qualified math teachers squared.

When there were 200 qualified math teachers, there were 5 useless administrators. As the number of qualified math teachers was cut back to 25, how many useless administrators were there?

Below is a calculation for Problem #1.
Below that is a parody of typical professional development (PD) for teachers and staff, related to Problem #1.

Answer: As the number of qualified math teachers was cut back to 25, the number of useless administrators increased to 320.

This number, of course, is fake. The number of truly qualified math teachers in most public school districts (i.e. those who know enough math to teach it to at least their grade and the grade following) has been purposefully cut back by colleges of education and administrators to “small,” “infinitesimal,” or “a speck, really.”

Will Fitzhugh:

Abstract The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Is it really fair for them to work harder?

e.g.

Writing a paper for the Review was a completely new experience for me. Suddenly, there were no word limits and no guidelines to dictate what my paper had to look like; these guidelines had previously determined every paper that I had written in past history classes. I was free to pursue whatever aspect of my topic that I wanted to whatever extent that I wanted. It was liberating, but also incredibly intimidating. At first, I admittedly felt lost and even scared about where I was supposed to take my paper.

Begin forwarded message:
From: Janet Chen
Date: March 16, 2012 11:27:57 AM EDT
To: Will Fitzhugh
Subject: Re: Concord Review Authors

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my essay on the unauthorized disclosures of the Pentagon Papers. If you have the time to read this email, I would like to provide you with some background information on the process that I underwent while researching this paper. I am currently a Junior attending (public) high school in Boulder, Colorado. I initially wrote a much shorter version of this essay for my U.S. history teacher, Mrs. Leigh Campbell-Hale.

The process of researching and completing this [9,963-word] paper took two years. In 2010, I decided to study the Pentagon Papers because at the time when I was selecting topics, the Wikileaks incident was all over the news. I became fascinated by the leak of information, the current presidential administration’s handling of it, and the public controversy that the leak ignited. One trend that I noticed throughout many of the news articles that I followed was comparison between the current Wikileaks disclosures and the historical leak of the Pentagon Papers. Fascinated, I thought that a closer study of the historical Pentagon documents might provide me with answers to some of the current questions that I had about contemporary leaks.

I came upon President Nixon’s telephone transcripts by accident; initially, I had not intended to focus upon that aspect of the leak. However, reading the transcripts made me realize that there were a lot of discrepancies between what my secondary sources were telling me (that is, what historians previously believed about the leak) and what the transcripts actually show. I began to realize that because there was new evidence that historians previously did not have the opportunity to consider, this topic demanded a reassessment.

I’d like to thank The Concord Review for pushing me beyond my academic boundaries. After my teacher read the much shorter version of my paper, she suggested that I submit a longer one to The Concord Review. Writing a paper for the Review was a completely new experience for me. Suddenly, there were no word limits and no guidelines to dictate what my paper had to look like; these guidelines had previously determined every paper that I had written in past history classes. I was free to pursue whatever aspect of my topic that I wanted to whatever extent that I wanted. It was liberating, but also incredibly intimidating. At first, I admittedly felt lost and even scared about where I was supposed to take my paper.

In the shorter version of this essay, I relied heavily upon my secondary sources and I did not pursue the primary source telephone transcripts to the extent that I should have. I used various excuses to justify this to myself—the word limit wouldn’t have allowed me to fully analyze the transcripts; moreover, the transcripts didn’t seem to fit the guidelines that my teacher had asked for. However, the truth was, I didn’t think that I had the intellectual capability to take on such a challenging academic task. Directly analyzing primary materials and drawing original conclusions (instead of relying upon secondary material) was something that my teacher called “real history”; I was convinced that only “real historians” and graduate level students were capable of doing that kind of research. However, after reading the essay in the Review about Andrew Jackson and his Indian removal policy, I realized that I had been mistaken. Suddenly, none of my previous excuses seemed legitimate. That weekend, I made calls to the National Archives and the National Security Archives to obtain all of President Nixon’s transcripts from that time period. I also emailed and called the historians whose works I had previously referenced in my research. I interviewed these scholars to find out more about the processes that they underwent in their research; I also discussed what they thought about the new evidence that had come out and how that new evidence could be used to revise the conclusions that they had come to years ago.

In retrospect, this has undoubtedly been the most demanding academic endeavor that I have ever undertaken during my high school years. More importantly, however, it has also been the most fascinating academic work that I have ever had the opportunity to engage in. I have learned so much not only about history and the Pentagon Papers, but also about my own critical thinking process and capabilities. Thank you again for taking the time to consider my essay, and thank you (and The Concord Review) for giving me the opportunity to go beyond my previous academic boundaries.

[She is in the Class of 2017 at Columbia University]

EAVESDROPPING ON THE PRESIDENT: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION’S DECISIONS CONCERNING THE LEAK OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS

Dahlia Remler:

“90% of papers published in academic journals are never cited.” This damning statistic from a 2007 overview of citation analysis recently darted about cyberspace. A similar statistic had made the rounds in 2010 but that time it was about 60% of social and natural science articles that were said to be uncited. Neither statistic came with a link to supporting academic research papers.

That lack of support was a problem for me. I did not doubt the basic truth that many academic papers are uncited. But to be sure 90% was not urban legend and to learn the context and caveats, I needed to find the original research paper. I was not the only one who wanted the supporting evidence. So, I dove into Google scholar, searching the disparaged academic literature for articles on academic citation rates.

What’s the truth?

Many academic articles are never cited, although I could not find any study with a result as high as 90%. Non-citation rates vary enormously by field. “Only” 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% (!) for the humanities. It’s 27% for natural sciences and 32% for social sciences (cite). For everything except humanities, those numbers are far from 90% but they are still high: One third of social science articles go uncited!

Ten points for academia’s critics.

Alan Borsuk:

“I made a lot of bad jokes about good people, just for a cheap laugh,” the athletic-looking junior from a suburban high school said. “Leave those jokes behind.”

That’s one step he can take to make his school better. And that was his commitment, made before more than 200 students from 14 high schools throughout southeastern Wisconsin at a “responsibility retreat” Thursday at Brookfield East High School.

At his school, another boy told the group, there’s too much sentiment “that giving up is accepted.” He wants to make next year, when he’ll be a senior, a time for demonstrating “a relentless work ethic.”

A lot of kids at her school think YOLO — you only live once — means you can do all sorts of stupid things, a girl told her peers. Recently, some students vandalized property near the school and embarrassed everyone. She wants her senior year to show “YOLO should be a positive thing, to try to make the best impact you can.”

I guessed that there would be a long, awkward silence when organizers of the morning-long event invited students voluntarily to step up to a microphone to name one positive change they would take next year. I was wrong. At the last part of the three-hour session, kids came forward in quick succession, three dozen in all. The line stopped only because time ran out.

Jeremy Kun:

As a teacher I encounter all of the typical kinds of students. There’s one kind of student I routinely encounter, usually in a freshman calculus course, that really boils my blood: the failing student who “has always been good at math.”

Oh it’s so annoying! And it’s even worse to hear because the stuff we teach in calculus isn’t really math either. The irony is so thick in the air when a student says it I’m surprised I don’t cough. Invariably, they never actually understood the “math” they were always so good at. I don’t get angry because they don’t understand the material (indeed, that’s the point of the class!). I get mad because they have absorbed a message about what constitutes mathematics that is, at best, misguided.

Of course, the problem is deeper than a handful of students who accidentally say ironically stupid things. The problem is that American high school students are taught something named “math” for four years which is not even close to math.

Nikil Saval:

But this white collar book: ah, there’s a book for the people; it is everybody’s book. … It is all about the new little man in the big world of the 20th century. It is about that little man and how he lives and what he suffers and what his chances are going to be; and it is also about the world he lives in, has to live, doesn’t want to live in. It is, as I said, going to be everybody’s book. For, in truth, who is not a little man?
—C. Wright Mills, 
letter to his parents (1946)

In or around the year 1956, the percentage of American workers who were “white collar” exceeded the percentage that were blue collar for the first time. Although labor statistics had long foretold this outcome, what the shift meant was unclear, and little theoretical work had prepared anyone to understand it. In the preceding years, the United States had quickly built itself up as an industrial powerhouse, emerging from World War II as the world’s leading source of manufactured goods. Much of its national identity was predicated on the idea that it made things. But thanks in part to advances in automation, job growth on the shop floor had slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, the world of administration and clerical work, and new fields like public relations and marketing, grew inexorably—a paperwork empire annexing whole swaths of the labor force, as people exchanged assembly lines for metal desks, overalls for gray-flannel suits.

Thomas Lin:

reeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Inside Higher Ed:

Faculty members in the sciences spend too long on burdensome administrative work, at the expense of their other, more meaningful duties, argues a report out today from the National Science Board. The report, called “Reducing Investigators’ Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research,” is based on the work of the board’s Task Force on Administrative Burdens, which asked professors to identify through roundtable discussions and requests for information which federal and internal university procedures and requirements were the biggest drains on their time. Financial management, the grant proposal process, progress reports, institutional review boards, and layers of oversight related to working with animals all were common responses.

The paper acknowledges that some oversight is necessary, but says that regulations — once set — are not easily changed or lifted, and that “[principal investigators] at many institutions suggested that a culture of overregulation has emerged around federal research, which further increases their administrative workload.” The paper argues that such problems have been cited for years — including two Federal Demonstration Partnership surveys that found principal investigators spend 42 percent of their time on administrative tasks — but that failure to address them has resulted in “wasted” federal research dollars. “Escalating compliance requirements and inconsistent audit practices directly impact scientists and the time they have to perform research and train students and staff,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, board vice chairman and a member of the Task Force.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

“I’M GONNA WASH THAT MAN RIGHT OUTTA MY HAIR,” I sang in a full voice from the back row of a University of Texas lecture hall, over the heads of fifty cringing undergraduates. It was the spring of 1995, and I was the oldest student (by at least five years) in a history course called United States Culture, 1945–Present. That day we had a guest lecturer, an American-studies professor who had produced award-winning books on documentary expression in the 1930s and on postwar Broadway musicals. His lecture was on the importance of the latter. He had just asked the room if any of us knew any Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers. Swept away by the enthusiasm of the moment more than by my affection for Oklahoma! or South Pacific, I raised my hand and sang my reply.

Professor William Stott smiled and held his arms akimbo. He paused. Then responded. “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.” His voice was rich and joyful. We had broken the fourth wall of academic performance protocols; the expert’s lecture had somehow threatened to become a song swap. The already befuddled younger students in the class were now on the verge of horror, as this pair of aged show-tune enthusiasts shared a moment of mutual recognition with passion, confidence, and a complete lack of embarrassment.

Adam Kirsch:

The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants—most recently, $1 million to the University of Rochester to create a graduate fellowship.

Despite all this enthusiasm, the question of what the digital humanities is has yet to be given a satisfactory answer. Indeed, no one asks it more often than the digital humanists themselves. The recent proliferation of books on the subject—from sourcebooks and anthologies to critical manifestos—is a sign of a field suffering an identity crisis, trying to determine what, if anything, unites the disparate activities carried on under its banner. “Nowadays,” writes Stephen Ramsay in Defining Digital Humanities, “the term can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas.”

Gordon Lafer

During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state’s largest and poorest school district.

Ultimately, the only legislation enacted was a bill that modestly increases school reporting requirements, without stipulating consequences for low performance. Nevertheless, the more ambitious proposals will likely remain at the core of Wisconsin’s debates over education policy, and legislative leaders have made clear their desire to revisit them in next year’s session. To help inform these deliberations, this report addresses the most comprehensive set of reforms put forward in the 2013–2014 legislative session.

Backers of these reforms are particularly enamored of a new type of charter school represented by the Rocketship chain of schools—a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty, that reduces the curriculum to a near-exclusive focus on reading and math, and that replaces teachers with online learning and digital applications for a significant portion of the day. Rocketship proposes that its model—dubbed “blended learning” for its combination of in-person and computerized instruction—can cut costs while raising low-income students’ test scores (Rocketship Education 2011).

The call for public schools to be replaced by such tech-heavy, teacher-light operations comes from some of the most powerful actors in local and national politics: the major corporate lobbies, including Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC). It is these groups, rather than parents or community organizations, that provided the impetus for legislators to consider proposals for mass school closure and privatization in Milwaukee.

The report was discussed recently on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Related: Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP – voucher) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP..

Stephanie Simon:

The Obama administration plans to use tens of millions in federal financial aid as leverage to reward teacher training programs that produce teachers who routinely raise student test scores — and to drive the rest out of business.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce the revival of a push to regulate hundreds of teacher preparation programs Friday at a town hall meeting with White House policy director Cecilia Muñoz. He plans to release a draft regulation by summer and aims to enact it within a year.

The goal: To ensure that every state evaluates its teacher education programs by several key metrics, such as how many graduates land teaching jobs, how long they stay in the profession and whether they boost their students’ scores on standardized tests. The administration will then steer financial aid, including nearly $100 million a year in federal grants to aspiring teachers, to those programs that score the highest. The rest, Duncan said, will need to improve or “go out of business.”

Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann:

How do we ensure American middle class prosperity in an era of ever-intensifying globalization and technological upheaval? That is the question we are trying to answer with NEXT—a project at Third Way that taps into cutting edge research by top American academics.

To see into the future, look at 8th grade. If an 8th grader gets As and Bs in school, that student will likely earn a college degree. If that same student gets only Bs and Cs, college completion is unlikely. That is one of the stunning conclusions from authors Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann in their report on gender, mobility, and college attainment.

The implications of their findings are astounding, especially when girls do better than boys in school by 8th grade and continue to widen their lead over boys in education attainment. Because our economy rewards educational attainment and punishes the lack of it, could women soon become the primary economic drivers of the U.S. economy?

Tap for a larger version.

Madison School District PDF:

100% of elementary schools have began implementation of Mondo
– 12 schools in year 2 of implementation; and 20 schools in Year 1 of implementation

Site visit model of professional learning

All elementary schools are implementing the shared reading and oral language components of Mondo, based on district professional development focus

Implementation of other components is variable across schools

Consistent implementation of the literacy block which includes non-negotiables:

MMSD CCSS scope and sequence with model units of instruction, Mondo, and Calle core materials

oral language instruction until students meet benchmark on Mondo Oral Language assessment

consistent research-based phonics instruction using the Mondo materials (K-1)

daily use of whole group shared reading using grade level texts
– small group instruction

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results and

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005).

Lauren Weber:

It seems like a perfect solution: employers need qualified employees. Apprenticeships offer an opportunity for workers to get the exact skills they need. So why are apprenticeships in decline? Lauren Weber is here with the story. Photo: Getty Images.

Ask CEOs and corporate recruiters whether they’re finding the workers they need, and they’ll lament about a skills gap that threatens productivity and growth—not just in their companies but in the economy at large.

Yet employers and state legislators have been decidedly lukewarm about a proven solution to the problem: apprenticeships.

Apprenticeships can offer a precise match between the skills employers want and the training workers receive, says Robert Lerman, an economics professor at American University.

“It’s a great model for transferring skills from one generation to the next,” says John Ladd, director of the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship.

Nevertheless, according to the Labor Department, formal programs that combine on-the-job learning with mentorships and classroom education fell 40% in the U.S. between 2003 and 2013.

Colleen Flaherty:

Brown University’s investigation into a professor accused of plagiarism was supposed to remain confidential. But after it was leaked to the student newspaper, the professor is speaking out both to apologize for what she says was unintentional plagiarism and to assert that her thoughts – if not always her words – remain her own.

While some colleagues criticized the university’s response to its inquiry into Vanessa Ryan, assistant professor of English, especially in light of the fact that she recently was named as an associate dean who oversees a graduate teaching program, others have come to her defense. Plagiarism is often framed as an ethical choice, they say, but unintentional plagiarism is easier and maybe more common than many believe.

“In August 2013, I learned that my book contains inadvertent errors of attribution, which resulted from mistakes I made in documenting my research as I worked on the project over many years,” Ryan said via email. “I take full responsibility for these mistakes.”

At the same time, she said, “While, as a result of these mistakes, my book uses words from other scholars’ writings without attribution, the substance of the ideas in the book is my own.”

Jenna Ashley Robinson:

Across the country, student health centers are showing signs of financial bloat and costly mission creep. Funded by both hefty campus health fees and payments from students’ insurers, university health centers spend their extra cash on boutique services and progressive programs.

In universities’ early days, the campus infirmary was simple. As a primary care practice on campus, it was a convenience for students who caught the flu or a cold at school. The infirmary’s services were available to insured and uninsured alike. Now, however, all students must carry health insurance. Many schools, including the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina system, put in place an “individual mandate” years before the Affordable Care Act. With the Act’s passage, all students must be insured.

And they are–often with “Gold” plans that cover everything from maternity care, to prescription drugs, to substance abuse counseling. If they use the student health center, students’ co-pays are waived. But at many schools, they pay through the nose for the privilege. Saving $25 in co-pays hardly seems to justify paying health fees ranging from $50 to nearly $1,000.

Harvard and Stanford are two of the worst offenders. At Harvard, the student health fee is $958.00. Health insurance, which students must also purchase, is $2,190. At Stanford, the fee is a more modest $573 for the 2014-15 academic year. But the student health insurance plan costs a whopping $3,936 per student!

Edward Luce:

America – so the song says – is the land of the free and home of the brave. It does not always feel that way. Last week the Food and Drug Administration said it would regulate e-cigarettes like normal tobacco. This is in spite of the fact there is no proof it leads people on to the real ones. Quite the reverse – the whole point is to help people kick the habit. Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles have gone further and banned e-cigarettes in public places. There is no evidence their vapour causes harm to users or bystanders. The sight of it alone is apparently offensive enough.

The US has always struggled between its impulse for freedom and a Calvinistic urge to meddle. The pendulum in early 21st-century America is swinging back to intrusion. Whether it is workplace safety, traffic, public health or social behaviour, there is a creeping impulse to micro-regulate.

Far from the freedom of the open road, today’s US offers a spider’s web of local and federal rules. Fancy bicycling without a helmet or unleashing your dog? Or perhaps opening a can of beer on the beach? There is an ordinance forbidding it. New York is trying to ban 16-ounce soda. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew would not feel out of place in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. Sugar is the new tobacco, we are told. How soon before we get to caffeine?

Madison Teachers, Inc., Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Pursuant to changes in MTI’s Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement, teacher contracts for the 2014-15 school year will now be issued in MAY instead of March. Signed contracts of all teachers returning for the 2014-15 school year must be received in the MMSD Human Resources Office no later than June 16. MTI strongly recommends that teachers return their signed contracts AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, in person, to assure timely delivery. Take a copy with you, ask that it be stamped “received”, and keep it for your personal records. Failure to return a signed contract by June 16 may result in the District accepting such as one’s resignation.

Joss Winn:

I am writing a paper on ‘academic labour‘ – well, I have been for some time now – and I’m beginning to get a sense of the literature in this field of scholarship. My approach to understanding academic labour is to try to adopt Marx’s social theory and method; to first understand labour abstractly and then, having done so, to examine and explain the way academic labour appears concretely at a particular moment in time. Ideally, it is a dialectical process of both deduction and induction; one which asserts that capitalist society is structured by a “quasi-independent logic” (Postone, 1993) whereby socially constructed abstractions have real concrete existence and power over people (i.e. “real abstraction”). What I’m finding is that the literature on academic labour largely focuses on the latter approach (i.e. attention is give to the concrete labour process) while rarely reaching the former (i.e. abstraction), let alone being grounded in it. One of the problems with such an approach is that the “hypostatisation of the concrete” (Postone, 1986) is a form of reification which more often leads to a sense of helplessness, or even worse, fascism. Postone considers this grasp of the abstract as concrete as “an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.”

Brandon Harris:

As with most things that are prominently featured on television, the recently concluded NCAA tournament is made of money. A lot of it. $10.8 billion dollars to be exact. Money changes hands in innumerable ways – Turner Broadcasting and CBS pay the NCAA that enormous sum over fourteen years, with the organization parcelling out $740 million dollars annually to its member institutions, with those same institutions employing the highest paid public servants in all 50 states — the overwhelming majority of whom are college basketball or football coaches. Generally when broadcasters pay for the rights to broadcast a program in which skill intensive labor goes into its making, the folks putting on the show see a significant portion of windfall. The performers on Downton Abbey or even The Real Housewives of Atlanta don’t keep us entertained for free, after all.

When it comes to the vast treasure trove the NCAA commanded from Turner and CBS however, one supported by millions around the country who endure the most asinine Pizza Hut or Progressive Insurance commercials in order to watch unpaid men play basketball in packed arenas, a whole different set of rules applies. The athletes see no windfall at all, other than, room, board and “training” (i.e. a college education). Regardless of how desirable or valuable a college education is, that this situation almost completely mirrors the definition of indentured servitude (“A person who is bonded or contracted to work for another for a specified time, in exchange for learning a trade or for travel expenses.”) shouldn’t escape us. With such manifestly unfair labor relations, how can you, sports disdaining, labor supporting, coastal liberal of my imagination, avoid your obligation to stand aghast at such a spectacle of injustice? Where is your moral outrage?

Kristina Peterson:

During Congress’ two-week recess, House Republican leaders assigned lawmakers some homework: go visit charter schools.

The field trips were part of a coming House push on education, a topic that has received relatively little attention in Congress lately amid the battles about health care and budgets.

But with major fiscal fights delayed until after November’s midterm elections, leaders of both chambers are preparing to focus on education as lawmakers return to Washington this week. Though the campaign-season sniping about the health-care law shows few signs of abating, Democrats and Republicans alike view education legislation as a key plank in their agendas for expanding opportunity and a comfortable arena in which to seek support from younger voters and families.

The GOP-controlled House is pushing a bipartisan bill aimed at expanding access to charter-school funding and making it easier to open new charter schools modeled after those that have been the most successful. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.), long a proponent of broadening school choice, said in a memo Friday that the House would vote on the bill the week of May 5.

Hamilton Nolan:

Interesting little tidbit for all good liberals to chew over: a list of the U.S. cities with the very worst income inequality includes an inordinate number of university towns.

Bloomberg today has published a list of the 50 American cities with the greatest income inequality. The top three are Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami, all predictable southern metropoli. But take away the major cities, and what really stands out is the fact that the second-tier cities that make the list include a ton of college towns. For example:

Charles Davis:

The calls started when I was a junior in high school—always in the evening, always after The Simpsons and always with an older gentleman on the other end of the line.

“Charles, there’s someone who wants to speak you,” my mother would yell from the kitchen. She showed no concern as she handed me the phone, no alarm in her eyes over all the calls she was getting from strange middle-aged men looking to chat up her vulnerable teenage son. That’s because these creepers called themselves “colonels” and “sergeants,” which lent authority to their predation. These men were military recruiters – and the bed they wanted to get me in was housed in some barracks.

A few weeks earlier, a uniformed Marine had come to my high school, set up an efficient little booth in the cafeteria and, in exchange for a stupid hat or a bumper sticker, convinced me and some other boys desperate to be men to give him our names and home phone numbers. After that, at least once a week I had to deal with a recruiter calling me “dude” or “man” while promising that military service would allow me to see the world and sleep with many of its women.

Scott Jaschik:

A survey of more than 6,000 faculty members, across a range of disciplines, has found that when prospective graduate students reach out for guidance, white males are the most likely to get attention. The survey also found that public university faculty members are much more likely than their private counterparts to respond equally to students of varying backgrounds. And the greatest victims of discrimination may be those with names that suggest they are Chinese women.

The study (abstract available here) — just released by the Social Science Research Network — aims to identify whether academics create pathways for students of all kinds who want to enter graduate school.

For the study, three researchers sent faculty members letters (as would-be grad students), expressing interest in talking about research opportunities in the program, becoming a graduate student and learning about the professor’s work. The letters asked for a 10-minute discussion. The letters were identical in every way except for the names of the fictional people sending them (see text at bottom of article).

Academe:

In this past week’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a very revealing graph representing the changes in employment in colleges and universities from 1976 to 2011. The graph is based on an analysis of IPEDs data by AAUP’s John Curtis.

Full-Time Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty

1976 – 353,681

2011 – 436,293

Increase – 23%

Graduate Student Employees

1976 – 160.086

2011 – 358,743

Increase – 123%

Full-Time Executives

1976 – 97,003

2011 – 233,368

Increase 141%

Full-Time Non-Tenure Track Faculty

1976 – 80,883

2011 – 290,238

Increase – 259%

Part-Time Faculty

1976 – 199,139

2011 – 768,071

Increase – 286%

Full-Time Non-Faculty Professional Staff

1976 – 150,319

2011 – 704,505

Increase – 369%

If we simply could not afford to maintain a level of faculty on tenure tracks proportionate to student enrollment, that would be one thing.

Stacey Patton:

Leigh-Anne Francis wishes she had listened to her pregnant wife, who begged her not to leave the house that night. She could have been at home putting the finishing touches on her syllabi and lecture notes, instead of handcuffed to a bench at a local police station.

It was August 29, 2013, the night before the start of the fall semester at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, a midsize public college in the picturesque foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Francis, a Jamaican-born professor fresh out of graduate school, was prepping for her first lectures when she decided to make a late run to pick up Thai take-out. She was excited about starting her new tenure-track job in black studies and U.S. history at Oneonta—one she had landed months before earning a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. (I studied history at Rutgers, too, and I took a few courses with Francis.) Francis and her wife Jenny, who is white, had moved from northern New Jersey just six days earlier.

The Wall Street Journal:

The federal student loan program is becoming so costly to taxpayers that even President Obama is pretending to fix it. Readers will recall Mr. Obama as the man who has spent much of his Presidency expanding this program, creating new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment, and then campaigning about these dubious achievements on campuses nationwide.

Now Team Obama is acknowledging that his policies are turning out to be more expensive than he claimed. Participation in federal debt-forgiveness programs is surging. In a mere six months the number of borrowers who’ve signed up for such plans has increased to more than 1.3 million from less than a million, with total balances rising to $72 billion from $52 billion. Maybe the White House didn’t understand that when you give people an economic incentive not to repay a loan, more people won’t repay.

Jenni Dye:

But when I attended UW for law school, my total debt quickly topped $100,000, with interest rates locked in at 6.8 percent and 8.8 percent due to changes in federal law. Consolidation couldn’t reduce the interest rate, as federal law required my loan remain at the average of my existing interest rates.

But, because IBR payments may not cover accruing interest, after paying roughly $20,000 toward my loans in the past five years, I now owe more than I did when I graduated. Under IBR, any amounts owed after 25 years of repayment may be forgiven, but under current law that forgiveness will be taxable, leaving borrowers to make a large balloon payment to the IRS. Meanwhile, the federal government is projected to earn $127 billion off student loans in the next 10 years.

Multiply my story by the thousands upon thousands of borrowers in Wisconsin alone — and by our families, many of whom have helped us along the way. And multiply it by our kids, who will enter college while we are still trying to pay off our own debt. Then you start to have a picture of the impact of $1 trillion of student debt.

Bob Samuels:

The UC has published its 2014 admissions’ statistics, and while the system is still required to admit all qualified students from California, a secret tactic is being used to make sure that it increases the number of high-paying non-resident and international students. What the UC is doing is admitting students from California, but not offering them places at the campuses of their choice. Simply put, students are applying to Berkeley and UCLA, but they are being admitted to Merced and Riverside.

Looking at the latest statistics, we see that Berkeley accepted 8,391 students from California, 3,071 from out of state, and 1,333 international students. Likewise, UCLA accepted 9,128 from California, 4,095 from out of state, and 2,537 international students. So out of the 28,555 students accepted by both campuses, 11,036 are not from California. These students (39% of the total admittees) each pay $23,000 exrtra for tuition, and they do not receive financial aid. Of course, not all of these students will accept their admission offers, but if all of them did, the two campuses would bring in an additional $254 million.

Gary Silverman:

But I’m revisiting my youthful folly in this forum in the interest of the historical record. Looking back on it, my romantic notions about love and higher education were rooted in a world that is no more – the pre-internet, postwar suburb (mine being located on Long Island, outside New York City).

When I mailed in my university applications a few hours before the start of the American bicentennial year of 1976 – using white liquid paper to correct my typing mistakes on forms of different colours – I was many years away from owning my first cell phone, tablet or personal computer. There was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter, either.

As a result, just about the only other college applicants I knew lived in the same place I did. I’m talking about a corner of the East Meadow public school district that fed the smaller of the two high schools in that jurisdiction – W Tresper Clarke (which was named after a former president of the East Meadow board of education, then and now the only man in my experience who wanted to be called Tresper).

I was provincial in a way that would be nearly impossible today – even in many of the more remote corners of the planet. But the curious thing is that my lack of contact with young people anywhere else bred a near certainty that they would be more interesting than the ones with whom I was raised.

David Perry:

Do you think adjunct rights are a civil-rights issue?” This question came to me from a young scholar about to defend his Ph.D. He’s just finishing a great one-year position but does not have employment yet for next year.

Trying to answer his question led me into an interesting group of writings that link the conditions of adjuncts to historically oppressed and exploited peoples such as slaves, sharecroppers, and migrant workers. This language may be misguided. But its apparent utility reveals one of the big obstacles to improving the condition of adjuncts in higher education today.

Clearly, the conditions of adjuncts are deplorable. From the homeless adjunct protesting in New York to the countless stories of inequity, struggle, hunger, and ostracism, the human toll of adjunctification should appall anyone who pays attention.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of voices have argued that adjunctification is best understood as something especially terrible rather than an all-too-typical example of the rise of contingency across the North American workforce. Why do advocates need to go to such rhetorical lengths to gain our sympathy?

Chris Rickert

Far be it from me to diss two free years of college for every American student.

And there are some decent reasons to support a recent proposal from a pair of UW-Madison faculty that would provide just that.

The problem is that students could get their free rides only at public institutions, and only if the federal government agreed to start stiffing the private ones. That’s as much an ideological shot across the bow as a way to solve problems plaguing higher education.

With tuition and student debt loads soaring, the paper by associate professors Sara Goldrick-Rab and Nancy Kendall was sure to get attention.
To free up the money needed to make their new entitlement possible, they propose cutting private colleges and universities off from the $80 billion money spigot known as federal financial aid.

Privates aren’t worthy of taxpayer dollars, they argue, in part because they aren’t subject to the same oversight as public institutions, and they eat up a disproportionate share of student aid.

While they enrolled only about 29 percent of undergraduates in 2012-13, privates collected 35 percent of Pell grants and 49 percent of Supplemental Educational Opportunity grants, the authors note.

There’s no doubt that some johnny-come-lately, for-profit private colleges have taken advantage of government largesse while failing to graduate students.

In a story last week in the UW-Madison student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, Goldrick-Rab calls out the University of Phoenix specifically.
But for every University of Phoenix, there’s an Edgewood College or a Beloit College — long-standing, mission-driven, nonprofit and generally positive influences on Wisconsin and the rest of the world.

Simon Kuper

I especially see apartheid in the US. True, the country has made racist speech taboo. Use a racial epithet in public and your career combusts. That’s lovely. However, American school taxes are usually raised locally, and many neighbourhoods are segregated, and so most poor black children attend underfunded schools where they learn just enough to do lowly jobs for whites. The US later tries to airlift a few victims out of the ghetto through “affirmative action”, but by then the damage is done. Like apartheid South Africa, the US ensures through schooling that most black people won’t succeed. It just doesn’t call this “Bantu education”.

My instinctive measure of a society is how closely it resembles South African apartheid. On that score the Netherlands – despite ample racist speech – arguably beats the US, because the Dutch give so-called “black schools” more funding than white suburban schools. Similarly, ethnically mixed-up London has less apartheid than segregated Paris.

South African apartheid determined people’s life paths from before birth. If you were a white embryo, you’d be fine. A black embryo wouldn’t. I remember, aged about 16, sitting on the porch of some ridiculous white adult fraud, listening to him preach about the stupidity of his black servants, and realising: this guy needs to believe he made his own success. Few people at the top can think, “Luckily, I chose the right parents.” Instead they tell themselves a story about work and talent – even though their maid probably outworks them, and nobody ever cared whether she had talent.

Inequality is the new apartheid. Your life path is largely determined before birth. The ruling classes pass on their status by sending their children to exclusive schools, much like in apartheid Johannesburg.

Happily, ethnicity is no longer always decisive. Still, today’s apartheid delivers outcomes as unequal as the old apartheid did. One measure of a society’s inequality is its Gini coefficient. South Africa’s Gini in 1995, just after apartheid, was a shocking 0.59 (where 0 is perfect equality, and 1 is perfect inequality). But Manhattan today has almost exactly the same Gini: 0.6, according to the US Census Bureau. Amazingly, South Africa itself has become less equal since apartheid: by 2009 the country’s Gini had risen to 0.63, says the World Bank.

From the comments:

There are several key errors regarding school funding- many of the poorest performing schools spend the most per pupil. Schools and taxes are funded at the local AND state level, as well as directed by school boards elected locally and state DOE’s … these have been run almost exclusively by one philosophical perspective for more than 50 years, with the corruption and lack of accountability that comes with it … and results have gotten worse, not better. Maybe time for a change of concept!?!

Madison spends about double the national average per student yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results. Money may be a factor, but as the Kansas City experiment reveled, it is hardly decisive.

Consultants for the Madison Schools (PDF):

The leadership has established a director of MTSS with the C&I department, which is critical from both functional and symbolic purposes.

District leadership has a strong Strategic Framework in place to support the MTSS process with the present focus on reading, with subsequent focus on writing and numeracy.

The data suggests with the attenuation of the special education population (i.e., from 17.8% to 14% in the last 3 years), early intervening processes are having a positive effect.

Despite inconsistencies in the process, schools are starting to use similar methodologies to screen (e.g., AimsWeb® & MAP), core materials (e.g., Mondo®) and interventions for students (Voyagers, Rewards, Language!)

The Madison School District (3MB PDF):

Five Priority Areas (just like the “Big 10”) but who is counting! – page 6:
– Common Core
– Behavior Education Plan
– Recruitment and hiring
– New educator induction
– Educator Effectiveness
– Student, parent and staff surveys
– Technology plan

2014-2015 “budget package” 3MB PDF features some interesting changes, beginning on page 92, including:

1. + $986,314 to other Wisconsin public school districts due to Outbound open enrollment growth and $160,000 for Youth Options (page 108)

2. + 5.3% Teacher & Staff Health insurance spending is $44,067,547, or 11% of total spending! (Page 92). Total teacher & staff benefits are $73,248,235 or 18% of total spending. Let’s compare (as best we can):

Madison: 18% budget web page. Note, Madison’s is likely higher than 18% as I did not count all “funds” beyond teachers and certain staff. I’ve sent an email to the District for a complete number.

Middleton: 15.7% 2013-2014 Budget (PDF) Middleton – Cross Plains School District Budget web page. Middleton’s document summarizes spending across all funds (Page 8), something that I did not find in the Madison document (Pages 110-123 summarize aspects of Madison’s spending).

Boston: 14.1% Boston Schools 2013-2014-2015 budget xls file) Boston schools’ budget information.

Long Beach: 15.9% (Long Beach Budget Document (PDF)) Long Beach budget information.

Madison Superintendent Cheatham cited the Boston and Long Beach Schools for “narrowing their achievement gap” during a July, 2013 “What Will be Different This Time” presentation to the Madison Rotary Club.

3. “Educational Services” (Page 96) benefits are $21,581,653 up 4.5%.

4. “Food Services” (Page 98) benefits are $2,446,305, up 4.2%.

5. 10.3%: MSCR’s health insurance cost increase (page 99). MSCR spending and property tax growth (“Fund 80”) has been controversial in the past.

The Madison School District’s per student spending has been roughly constant for several years at about $15,000. Yet, certain budget elements are growing at a rather high rate, indicating an ability to manage effectively by reallocating and raising tax dollars or the presence of a rather fluid budget.

“focused instead on adult employment”

Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary speech is always worth revisiting:

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district’s financial condition @17:30) when considering a District’s ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated….. “we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment” and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn.”

The price of budget spaghetti manifests itself via little to no oversight – see legitimate questions on the District’s most recent $26,200,000 maintenance referendum (another tax increase looms). These documents, while reasonably detailed, are impossible to compare to recent budgets.

The demise of Lawrie Kobza’s 2 page “citizen’s budget” will lead to growing cost of living and achievement gaps, including nearby Districts such as Middleton where a comparable homeowner spends 16% less on property taxes.

Ellen Goldberger:

Most of my faculty colleagues agree that Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), in which the task of teaching writing is one assigned to all professors, not just those who teach English or composition, is an important academic concept. If we had a WAC playbook, it would sound something like this: students need to write clear, organized, persuasive prose, not only in the liberal arts, but in the sciences and professional disciplines as well. Conventional wisdom and practical experience tell us that students’ ability to secure jobs and advance in their careers depends, to a great extent, on their communication skills, including polished, professional writing.

Writing is thinking made manifest. If students cannot think clearly, they will not write well. So in this respect, writing is tangible evidence of critical thinking — or the lack of it — and is a helpful indicator of how students construct knowledge out of information.

The WAC playbook recognizes that writing can take many forms: research papers, journals, in-class papers, reports, reviews, reflections, summaries, essay exams, creative writing, business plans, letters, etc. It also affirms that writing is not separate from content in our courses, but can be used as a practical tool to apply and reinforce learning.

—No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim: “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom. We are your vehicle into the past and into the minds of other human beings. Within our precincts are works of unparalleled eloquence, wit, and imagination; to die without having experienced them is to have led a life shortchanged.” [Heather Mac Donald]

As students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that end, Minding the Campus asked a list of distinguished thinkers a straightforward question: should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down? Here are responses from Heather Mac Donald, Thomas Lindsay, and Samuel Goldman.

***

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute

We shouldn’t only be unhappy if the liberal arts are “going down.” We should be ashamed. Our highest duty as a civilization is to keep alive those works from the past that gave birth to our present freedoms and that constitute the most profound expressions of what it means to be human.

I see no evidence that a “critical evaluation” of the liberal arts is underway, beyond an ignorant flight on the part of some college students towards more allegedly marketable majors. This idea of a job-ready major is a fallacy; outside of vocational training and some select STEM fields, few majors, whether economics or philosophy, have a direct connection to most jobs.

But while the marketable major is an illusion, there is no question that the conceit is driving many students away from humanistic study. The irony is that colleges are themselves wholly responsible for endangering those fields that were once their very raison d’être. For it is their sky-high tuitions that are fueling this migration into purportedly more bankable fields and their adolescent politicization of the humanities that is failing to give students a reason to look back.

Tuition levels are the result of universities’ own decision-making—above all, their insatiable drive to expand their student services bureaucracy. No branch of that endlessly growing bureaucracy is more senseless and self-indulgent than the diversity superstructure, founded as it is on a demonstrable lie: that colleges are bastions of discrimination against minorities and females.

Colleges could eviscerate the “I can’t afford to be a literature major” argument overnight by eliminating their wasteful bureaucracies and slashing their tuitions by half. In the meantime, the humanities should fight back against attrition with their strongest suit. Forget the “we teach critical thinking” gambit, and other mealy-mouthed efforts at asserting a vacuous, process-oriented relevance. No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim: “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom. We are your vehicle into the past and into the minds of other human beings. Within our precincts are works of unparalleled eloquence, wit, and imagination; to die without having experienced them is to have led a life shortchanged.”

Obviously, the humanities themselves have rendered such arguments off-limits with their plunge into narcissistic identity politics. Such terms as “beauty” and “knowledge” are deeply “contested,” as they say in High Theory, if not egregiously embarrassing. But if all that a liberal arts degree can offer students is another tour of oppression and victimhood, there’s no reason not to major in sociology. If the humanities go down, the loss will be universal, but they will have only themselves to blame.

============

Thomas Lindsay, Texas Public Policy Foundation

No one should be happy that the liberal arts are going down. Properly understood, the liberal arts constitute the core of the examined life defended in Socrates’ famous statement, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” In our secular age, the liberal arts represent the last, best hope of ennobling democracy, of liberating us from absorption in the present, of raising our gaze above ourselves, without which we risk sinking below the level of the beasts.

When we understand the liberal arts as indispensable to freeing us from unconscious thralldom to the unexamined assumptions that form our and every culture, we see that they are not “going down.”

They went down some fifty years ago. Beginning with the near-wholesale abandonment by our colleges and universities of a required core curriculum, which was replaced by its present-day impostors–“general education” and “distribution requirements”—our universities have become “multi-versities,” where courses are dished out in nearly as indiscriminate fashion as lunch choices at the campus cafeteria.

Going deeper, what brought down the liberal arts was the denial on the part of universities that there are absolute truths toward which the liberal arts might lead us and therewith liberate us from the unexamined life. In taking down the liberal arts, relativism simultaneously has toppled the authority of the defense of limited government and individual liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the U.S. Constitution. And this simultaneous takedown is no accident: The American experiment in self-government, like the liberal arts, stands or falls with the power of human reason to discover truth.

In this light, “market pressures” are not the chief factor driving the current, “critical reevaluation of the liberal arts.” More precisely, market pressures on the liberal arts are hardly new—Tocqueville’s time spent here in the 1830s led him to observe that democracy in America favors an education in what is useful toward securing comfortable self-preservation. But while market forces are not new, American society has of late come more and more to realize that the liberal arts, as currently impoverished by relativism, are of less and less value.

Further, the more impoverished the liberal arts become, the greater the ferocity with which they seek no longer to educate but rather to indoctrinate students into relativism’s willfully unexamined assumptions. On this latter point, no less than Harvard’s recent report on the humanities, “Mapping the Future,” agrees. The primary concern of “Mapping” is students exiting the humanities. Since 1966, humanities majors have dropped from 14 to 7 percent of degrees nationwide. In examining the reasons for the exodus, Harvard confesses to driving off independent-minded students repelled by the intolerance too often taught and practiced in the humanities. “Mapping” acknowledges, “We sometimes alienate” humanities students who get the message “that some ideas are unspeakable.”

Another factor often neglected amid our current concern over the fall of liberal arts study is the rise of the societal goal that nearly all should go to college. This educational romanticism fatally neglects the fact that mastery of a coherent, rigorous liberal arts curriculum is achievable by but a fraction of the great numbers now attending college thanks to the college-for-all orthodoxy. Thus, “Mapping’s” concern over the percentage-drop in humanities majors is likely overwrought, because, if the liberal arts are not for everybody, sending ever-more students to college should only be expected to reduce the percentage of humanities majors relative to the now-larger pool. The college-for-all agenda also has played no small role in diluting the rigor of what does remain of the liberal arts, thereby contributing to the popular perception that they lack intellectual respectability.

As to whether or not the critical reevaluation of the liberal arts will lead to their thoughtful reform or doom them to irrelevance, my point in this piece is that the pervasive relativism and concomitant intolerance currently found in the liberal arts already has doomed them in the deepest, most meaningful sense. We can and must, of course, hope that a reevaluation will produce thoughtful reform, but that does not answer the question, “From where and whom will reform come?” From the market? The liberal arts properly constituted were always looked to as a guide to rescue a purely market-oriented focus from falling guilty to the charge that it knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. From politicians? They have feared and likely will continue to fear pushback from those chiefly responsible for dooming the liberal arts, the higher-education establishment, which enjoys an organized, well-funded lobbying effort in both Washington, D.C., and the state capitols–whereas the people lack both the intensity and the organization required to threaten politicians’ electoral imperative.

This is far from saying that we should not hope that a critical reevaluation yields thoughtful reform. But hope is not a strategy. The fundamental question is this: Who will educate the educators? Any successful strategy must entail no less than a refounding of the American academy, which is to say, must entail restoring the quest for wisdom as the highest human possibility. Absent this, the most fundamental of human revolutions, one is hard-pressed to expect anything other than a continued descent into misology, intolerance, and barbarism.

===============

Samuel Goldman, George Washington University

The phrase “going down” is too general. Rather than a single entity, “the liberal arts” designates a far-flung constellation of activities and institutions. In order to assess the fate of the liberal arts, these dimensions have to be distinguished. Here are a few key elements of liberal arts, with some thoughts on challenges and prospects for each:

Liberal arts colleges. Liberal arts colleges are in big trouble. According to a 2012 article in the journal Liberal Education there were 212 liberal arts colleges (LACs) in the United States in 1990. Today, there are only 130.

Arguments about the higher education bubble would lead one to expect that the colleges that dropped off the list went bust. That’s not the case: only a few of the missing LACs actually closed. Instead, they changed their curricula, emphasizing pre-professional or vocational education.
This trend has affected remaining LACs, too. According to Swarthmore president Rebecca Chopp, only 10 residential liberal arts colleges in the country offer no vocational majors whatsoever. And at 55% of LACs, only about half the students graduate with liberal arts. In sum, there are many fewer liberal arts colleges than there used to be. And those that survive aren’t as humanistic as they used to be.

The weak job market almost certainly discourages students from enrolling in LACs or, if they do, majoring in the humanities. But the real problem is the abandonment of the justification for the LAC. Having rejected many of their traditional religious, civic, and moral responsibilities in the 1970s, LACs now have trouble explaining what they’re for. No wonder students prefer options that seem more likely to lead to employment and often cost less.

More serious teaching and learning goes on at liberal arts colleges than conservative critics sometimes suggest. Nevertheless, it is inconceivable that they will recommit as institutions to traditional ideals. As result, they will likely continue to die out, whether through actual closure or vocationalization. In a few decades, the only survivors may be elite LACs, which offer valuable branding as well as the small-scale setting in which some students thrive, and religious colleges which retain the sense of vocation that inspired the founders of American high education.

Undergraduate Education. The picture here isn’t quite so dire. Recent reports have trumpeted the finding that number of degrees conferred in liberal arts subjects has dropped precipitously since the 1960s. It turns out, however, that most of the drop occurred in the 1970s–long before the current economic crisis or the culture wars of the 1990s. So the challenge to undergraduate enrollments doesn’t seem to be either new market pressures or recent intellectual developments. In fact, much of the drop is attributable to women entering non-humanities fields as their professional opportunities expanded.

But this interpretation offers no cause for self-congratulation. The fact remains that the liberal arts hemorrhaged students in the 1970s–and have done nothing to win them back since. At elite universities, moreover, the number of humanities majors at elite universities has dropped in the last decade. The social sciences appear to be the main beneficiaries of the shift.

Unlike the crisis of liberal colleges, this problem has a solution. Professors and departments of the liberal arts don’t need major institutional commitments to attract more students. They do need to offer better courses. “Better” means two things: First, effective humanities courses need to focus on serious content of enduring importance rather than specialist research or pop culture ephemera. Second, they must include rigorous reading and writing requirements, which equip students with the flexible skills that employers value more than specific job training.

Offering better courses won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible. For that reason, I’m relatively optimistic about the prospects for liberal arts education within larger universities. The liberal arts will probably not recover the central role they enjoyed in the golden age of American higher education after World War II. But they don’t have to accept irrelevance.

Graduate Education. This subject is almost too depressing to discuss. For mostly self-serving reasons, departments of liberal arts subjects continue to admit far more Ph.D. students than they could ever hope to place in jobs. That wouldn’t be so bad if these students were honestly informed of their prospects and provided with adequate funding. Too often, however, they’re led to believe that chances of employment are much better than they really are and used as cheap labor to staff the classes that tenured faculty don’t want to teach.

The future of the graduate system is murky. For mysterious reasons, enrollment in doctoral programs in the arts and humanities actually increased by 7.7% in 2013. On the other hand, good (meaning pessimistic) information about the risks and rewards of graduate school in the humanities is much easier to find than in the past. So if more people are going forth to the slaughter, they can be expected to know what awaits them.

The Life of the Mind. But liberal education can’t be reduced to colleges, course offerings, or graduate program. As Leo Strauss suggested, these are organized settings for a certain kind of experience: the experience of things that the Greeks described as kalon–the fine, the beautiful, the noble. Do the liberal arts today offer this experience?

It seems to me that this question can’t be answered on the systematic level. The experience of the beautiful is something that happens to and among individuals engaged in study and discussion with and about great works and great minds. All the humanities majors in the world wouldn’t guarantee it. And the economic pressures and intellectual fads can’t preclude it.

So in the long run, I’m optimistic. The traditional objects of liberal arts study—the intellectual and artistic products of Western civilization–are too rich and too rewarding to go down permanently. Plato will still be Plato, Augustine will still be Augustine, Shakespeare will still be Shakespeare in fifty years, or a hundred, or a thousand. Barring social or environmental cataclysm, they will always find readers. And some of those readers will organize themselves for purposes of serious learning and teaching. Perhaps that will occur within universities, perhaps outside them. Either way, the liberal arts will survive.

Shahien Nasiripour:

The U.S. Department of Education is forecast to generate $127 billion in profit over the next decade from lending to college students and their families, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Beginning in the 2015-16 academic year, students and their families are forecast to pay more to borrow from the department than they did prior to last summer’s new student loan law, which set student loan interest rates based on the U.S. government’s costs to borrow. The higher costs for borrowers would arrive at least a year sooner than previously predicted.

James Kvaal, a top White House official, last year dismissed the possibility that student borrowers would pay higher costs under the new law. The Consumer Protection Financial Bureau on Monday warned borrowers about a “jump” in rates.

The projection, made public Monday by the nonpartisan budget scorekeepers, provides the federal government’s best estimate of how much the government’s student loan program will cost taxpayers. That the program is predicted to generate an average annual profit of about $12 billion through 2024 is likely to fuel calls for the Obama administration and Congress to take additional steps to reduce borrowers’ debt burdens, which the Education Department pegs at an average of more than $26,000.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The U.S. higher education crisis has been well documented. College is overpriced, over-valued, and ripe for disruption (preferably, for some critics, by the outcome-driven private sector). At the same time, many Americans are flailing in the post-recession economy. With rising income inequality, persistent long-term unemployment, and declining real wages, Americans are searching for purchase on shifting ground. Not so long ago, the social contract between workers, government, and employers made college a calculable bet. But when the social contract was broken and policymakers didn’t step in, the only prescription for insecurity was the product that had been built on the assumption of security. We built a university system for the way we worked. What happens to college when we work not just differently but for less? And what if the crisis in higher education is related to the broader failures that have left so many workers struggling?

There is a lot of talk right now about how we will work in the future, but it’s mostly based on the realities of how we work today. Many express concerns about the quality and quantity of “good jobs,” which sociologist Arne Kalleberg has characterized as jobs that pay a living wage, are on a ladder of career opportunity, and provide all the material benefits that make for economic security (such as retirement funds and health care). Beneath the surface of debates about yawning income inequality are empirical arguments about job polarization—the idea that the labor market is being pulled at both ends like taffy by global competition, technological change, and policy. At one end are high-skill, high-paying “good” jobs. At the other end are low-skill, low-paying “bad” jobs. The middle, meanwhile, is getting thinner and thinner. And job creation—as underwhelming as it is—is not evenly distributed among the jobs people want and the jobs people have to take. There are more bad new jobs than good. Economists Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu argue that in the 1980s jobs with lower skill requirements (and pay) started to increase their share of the labor market. That trend has only picked up after the great recession.

Brian T. Hill:

FFor the time being, I’m going to talk about material realities shared by comp/rhet and its others, rather than their differences.

There are all kinds of things I could say about the disciplinary and labor crises in our field, but for now I will focus on an interrelated set of areas with some brief comments, criticisms, or proposals for each: academia’s prestige economy, organized labor, graduate admissions, advisement, the “star system,” and, last and most importantly, undergraduates. Some of these thoughts and recommendations are very small, and some are quite a bit larger.

For starters, campuses, programs, and departments have few if any internal material incentives to make transformational structural changes to the existing divisions of labor. The current arrangement exists for a number of interrelated reasons, but surely one of the most pertinent reasons is that it’s economically beneficial for institutions to organize labor in a tiered wage and title system, with no-contract or low wage or no-benefits work, with labor delivered ‘just-in-time,” etc. Hence the enduring importance and prominence of labor strikes as one of the few bargaining tools still available to workers.

Will Fitzhugh:

While Chester Finn, Andy Smarick, Amanda Ripley, and others are bringing new attention to the methods and structures for the education of our most gifted high school students, for the most part that attention does not get much beyond what the adults do, could do, or should do with gifted students. There is little or no attention to the actual academic work of such students, other than on various tests, and evidently no consideration of how examples of the best work of such students, for instance on their science research, as in the Intel and Siemens competitions or their history research papers, as seen in The Concord Review, could be used to inspire not only their gifted peers at the secondary level, as well as other students, but to demonstrate that we not only wish to recognize the best efforts of adults in the work of educating the gifted, but to honor the actual academic achievements of gifted students as well.

However, it has long been the sad case that most experts and pundits who write about the education of the gifted—and of students in general—restrict their vision to what the adults are doing, and never seem able to notice that high school students are knowledge workers too, and fact that some are writing 15,000-word history research papers of first-rate quality, or conducting, often with the advice of a college professor, original scientific research of value as well.

These EduPundits give none of their limited attention to exemplary academic work by students, so they naturally don’t see it, and they don’t include any in their discussions of the education of the gifted. They fail to notice that in our high schools there are a good number of young autodidacts, and ignoring their work continues to produce a shamefully limited discussion of gifted education in almost every case.

Scholars at several levels have learned from and been inspired by the work of their peers, and it is most unfortunate that such important opportunities have been largely overlooked by the condescension or myopia of those writing about gifted education for our more serious high school students.

A few examples of work by high school students published in The Concord Review:

Albert Shanker was one of a tiny handful of unusual individuals [24 years ago] who understood right away that The Concord Review was not meant to benefit only, or even mainly, those whose work was published, but rather was “equally important” for those students who could be inspired, by reading the diligent work of their peers in this journal, to make more of an effort with their own academic work in high school….as he wrote in The New York Times in 1990: “The Concord Review is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time for us to take it seriously.”

Jessica Leight [summa cum laude at Yale] (PDF)

Colin Rhys Hill [Christ Church College, Oxford]

Alexandra Petri [summa cum laude at Harvard]

Sarah Valkenburgh [summa cum laude at Dartmouth]

Jennifer Shingleton [summa cum laude at Princeton]

——————————–
“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

“Were the Common Core authors serious about ‘college-readiness,’ they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been publishing impressive student history papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new (CC) standards, to Fitzhugh, enable ‘students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant New Deeper critical analysis of selected test passages.’ They will, however, ‘not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace.’ They are effectively being taught the art of propaganda through multimedia rather than the art of writing from a knowledge base in history….”

Mary Grabar, via Will Fitzhugh:

The word “doing” appears frequently in the NCSS guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s 2012 report, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future,” which was criticized roundly by the National Association of Scholars for using civics education to promote radical activism and anti-Americanism in higher education, instead of providing a knowledge base in history, civics, and geography.

In 2009, when I attended the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, I learned that most of the educators bristled at the idea of following educational “standards.” Most of the sessions involved sharing strategies for formally adhering to standards, while covertly turning students into activists for radical causes. Among these were repeal of immigration laws, statehood for Washington, D.C., and acceptance of Islam as superior to Christianity. Instead of being given a knowledge base in history, civics, and geography, students were emotionally manipulated into being advocates, attending protests, and lobbying legislators.

Flash forward to 2014. Now the objectives of these social studies teachers are the objectives of Obama’s Department of Education. The Common Core “standards” for math and English Language Arts are the law in 45 states. Those for science and social studies have been written, but are still voluntary.

Eschewing traditional forms of knowledge acquisition and writing (the old standards), “The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: State guidance for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics, economics, geography, and history” promote the idea of doing social studies. Yes, “doing.”

The word “doing” appears frequently in the guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s 2012 report, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future,” which was criticized roundly by the National Association of Scholars (myself included) for using civics education to promote radical activism and anti-Americanism in higher education.

In order to advance similar activism, the authors of the K-12 “C3 Framework” caricature traditional education as pouring knowledge into students who are passive vessels. But traditional, classical education, founded on a firm base of knowledge, is the kind that works and best prepares students for adult life. It incorporates three levels of learning outlined by the Atlanta Classical Academy charter school, as taken from their successful petition before the Board of Education:

Grammar Stage (mastery of key foundational facts, rules, and tools, imparted by teachers who are experts in their subject);
Logic Stage (mastery of relationships, categories, and order to create coherent frameworks);
Rhetoric Stage (communication and reasoning).

Notably, Common Core skips the first step, reducing it to a haphazard process of “discovery”—a hallmark of progressive education. The cart is put before the horse through “experiential” learning, where students “practice the arts and habits of civic life.”

There is no sense that students should first acquire a solid foundation of historical knowledge. Rather, students are left to do “inquiry” with “Four Dimensions”: 1) “developing questions and planning inquiries;” 2) “applying disciplinary concepts and tools;” 3) “evaluating sources and using evidence;” and, 4) “communicating conclusions and taking informed action.”

It can hardly be said that children are capable of “taking informed action.” Yet the cover photographs of the report draft (dated April 9, 2013) reveal the authors’ aims by showing children in a public forum, looking at a globe (perhaps plotting their next business move in the “twenty-first century workplace”?), and in a group leaning over plans (mimicking modern-day advertisements of the corporate working world). The final photo shows a street protest with signs saying, “No” to toxic waste.

Such photos belie the authors’ claim that “Advocates of citizenship education cross the political spectrum” and are “bound by a common belief that our democratic republic will not sustain unless students are aware of their changing cultural and physical environments; know their past; read, write, and think deeply; and, act in ways to promote the common good.” Rather, these advocates use children for their own aims, placing adult burdens on them, while denying them a real education.

The Objectives for Second Grade

Age-inappropriateness also becomes evident in a table called “Suggested K-12 Pathway for College, Career and Civic Readiness Dimension 1.” It states that “by the end of grade 2” (emphasis added) the student will construct compelling questions and “explain why the compelling question is important to the student” and “identify disciplinary concepts found or implied in a compelling question.” (A note explains, “Students, particularly before middle school, will need considerable guidance and support from adults to construct questions that are suitable for inquiry.” Of course, they would need “guidance.” That’s where the teacher can impose her own, leading questions.)

The second-grader, furthermore, in a mind-boggling quest, must “make connections between supporting questions and compelling questions” and “identify ideas mentioned and implied by a supporting question” and then “determine the kinds of sources that will be helpful in answering compelling and supporting questions.”

Writing assignments do not follow an age-appropriate progression, either. Dimension 4, “Communicating Conclusions,” calls for second-graders to “construct an argument with reasons” and “present a summary of an argument using print, oral and digital technologies.” High school seniors are to do similar tasks in a slightly more sophisticated form, for example, in constructing arguments, using multiple sources, and acknowledging counterclaims and evidentiary weaknesses.

What can a “college-ready” senior do?

While second-graders are asked to “think like historians,” the high school senior is asked to perform unscholarly tasks, such as presenting “adaptations of arguments and explanations that feature evocative ideas and perspectives on issues and topics to reach a range of audiences and venues outside the classroom using print and oral technologies (e.g., posters, essays, letters, debates, speeches, reports, maps) and digital technologies (e.g., internet, social media, digital documentary).” Even essays and reports get buried amidst posters, social media, and digital documentaries.

The authors refer back to the English Language Arts (ELA) standards for guidance, but these are vague and loose, for example, Standard 7, which “focuses on ‘short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions.” The social studies standards also go back to the ELA’s emphasis on “Speaking and Listening Standards,” wherein “students engage one another strategically using different forms of media given a variety of contexts in order to present their knowledge and ideas.” As if these were really vigorous, the authors cite “examples,” such as participating in a “range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners” and making “strategic use of ‘media and visual display’ when presenting.”

This is hardly preparation for college work in the traditional sense. Traditional work would involve sifting through historical material knowledgeably, and compiling it in the well-reasoned format of a scholarly paper. Were the Common Core authors serious about “college-readiness,” they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been holding contests and publishing impressive student papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new standards, to Fitzhugh, enable “students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant New Deeper critical analysis of selected test passages.” They will, however, “not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace.” They are effectively being taught the art of propaganda through multimedia rather than the art of writing through a knowledge base in history, civics and geography.

The new social studies standards are not surprising, considering the work of social studies teachers behind the scenes at conferences and elsewhere. They now have an administration that supports their radical aims. Consider the members of the “writing team” of this report, including this large majority:

Kathy Swan, lead writer/project director: associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Kentucky, and coauthor of And Action! Doing Documentaries in the Social Studies Classroom. Her research focuses on “standards-based technology integration, authentic intellectual work, and documentary-making in the social studies classroom.”

Keith C. Barton, professor of curriculum and instruction and adjunct professor of history at Indiana University and co-author of Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools and Teaching History for the Common Good.

Flannery Burke, associate professor of history at Saint Louis University who specializes in environmental history, the history of the American West, and gender studies.

Susan W. Hardwick, professor emerita of geography at the University of Oregon and co-host of the Annenberg/PBS series The Power of Place.

John Lee, associate professor of social studies education at North Carolina State University and co-director of the New Literacies Collaborative, http://newlit.org (connected to Linda Darling-Hammond).

Peter Levine, Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University, author of Engaging Young People in Civic Life, and a proponent of left-wing “civic engagement.”

Karen Thomas-Brown, associate professor of social studies and multiculturalism at the University of Michigan-Dearborn with research interests in “neoliberalism and the impact of globalization on the operation of secondary urban centers in developing countries.”

Cynthia Tyson, professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, “where she teaches courses in multicultural and equity studies in education; early childhood social studies; and multicultural children’s literature.”

Bruce VanSledright, professor of history and social studies education at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His research focuses on “doing history.”

Merry Wiesner-Hanks, professor of history, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with a special interest in women’s and gender history.

Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college English for over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., an education reform initiative that offers information and resources for students, parents, and citizens. The motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis.

Glenn H. Reynolds:

Like most professors, I hate doing administrative work. And since somebody has to do it, universities have increasingly built up a corps of full-time administrators. That’s fine, but lately, the administrative class has grown too numerous and too heavy-handed. As colleges and universities increasingly face financial pressures, it’s time to rethink.

Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to shrink faculty numbers while keeping administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an “adjunct administrator.”

But it’s not just the fat that is worrisome. It’s administrators’ obsession with — and all too often, abuse of — security that raises serious concerns. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Clyde W. Barrow, a leading professor, has just quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.

Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as “threats.” A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a “threat” that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year old daughter wearing a Game Of Thrones T-shirt. The shirt bore a quote from the show, reading: “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” Bergen administrator Jim Miller apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt’s Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat to him. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)

Michael Stratford:

Some student loan borrowers have reported to federal consumer protection officials that their private lenders automatically placed them in default when their cosigner died or filed for bankruptcy, even when the borrowers were otherwise paying the loan on time.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau highlighted that issue on Wednesday in a report analyzing the more than 2,300 complaints it had received about private student loan companies from the beginning of last October through the end of March. (The volume of complaints was up by more than one-third compared to the same period last year).

The issue is that some private student loans contain terms allowing lenders to demand the full outstanding amount of a loan when a borrower’s cosigner — often a parent or grandparent — dies or files for bankruptcy protection, according to Rohit Chopra, the CFPB’s student loan ombudsman who authored the report.

Virginia Postrel:

The parents and newly admitted students visiting colleges this month are asking questions about social life, study habits and — everyone’s favorite topic these days — job prospects after graduation. These are all important subjects, but if you care about your child’s intellectual development, or just want to keep the kid out of trouble, you should also ask about the university’s attitudes toward free speech.

For more than a decade I’ve been on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil-liberties watchdog group that defends the rights of college students and faculty. As you probably assumed, many cases FIRE gets involved in stem from “politically correct” censorship; but the range of university abuses is much wider than that. The motives often have less to do with ideology than with administrative bullying, paranoia or stupidity.

To take a particularly absurd example, in January a Bergen Community College professor was placed on leave after he posted on Google+ a photograph of his young daughter wearing a “Game of Thrones” T-shirt with the quote, “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” An administrator deemed the photo a disturbing threat of violence.

Thomas Lindsay:

When Bill Ayers observed that “every revolution is impossible until it happens, and then, looking backwards, every revolution appears inevitable,” it is safe to say that he did not have in mind any endeavors of conservative Texas governor Rick Perry. But with his 2011 state of the state address, Perry may have launched a revolution of his own. Perry challenged Texas’s public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10,000 in tuition, fees, and books, and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency.

The idea met with skepticism. Andy Brown, who was then chairman of the Travis County Democrats, labeled Perry’s “scheme to serve up $10,000 college degrees … preposterous,” adding that “nobody in higher education believes that is even possible.” Peter Hugill, a Texas A&M professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, posed the rhetorical question: “Do you really want a stripped-down, bare-bones degree?” Hugill went on to declare that “$10,000 seems to me a number someone pulled out of the air.”

If these reactions suggested Perry was out of step with the higher-education establishment, the public’s reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers. Baselice and Associates conducted a public-opinion survey commissioned by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently. Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost. Seventy-five percent of respondents declared college simply unaffordable.

USM Economics Blog:

Wanting to look into this, I did a little bit of Googling about Noel-Levitz to see if I could find out anything of use about them. As it mentions above, they are an “enrollment management” consulting firm- the largest in the United States. What enrollment management consulting firms tend to offer universities and university systems is something called “financial aid leveraging.” If you clicked that link, you’ll see that it’s pretty hard to understand exactly what that is. I found that an article from the Atlantic from a few years ago explained it far more clearly than the companies that do it: in short, financial aid leveraging is the act of repackaging financial aid so that it is specifically directed at students that a complex algorithm determines as most likely to make the school more money. Frequently, this means taking financial aid away from the people who need it the most and giving it to people who are more likely to stay in school. If you look at the operating budget documents, you’ll notice that a majority of Noel-Levitz’s recommendations are related to financial aid.

While you can have a discussion of ethics about this practice on its own, something else is what made me uncomfortable:

Noel-Levitz is a former subsidiary of Sallie Mae, the student loan giant. If you’re not acquainted with Sallie Mae’s reputation, a quick Google search should remedy that.

Now, Sallie Mae isn’t what it used to be; it’s no longer officially tied to the government (now it’s publicly traded and has changed its name to SLM). However, in 2013, Sallie Mae was contracted by the Department of Education as the servicer of almost 20% of new federal student loans. That means, in general, that the more federal student loans there are, the more money Sallie Mae makes. In addition, Sallie Mae will sometimes sell off some of its loans in the form of financial securities. However, the income from those contracts ($109 million in 2013) pales in comparison to its income from selling those securities ($13.8 billion in 2012) and offering their own private student loans ($37.5 billion in loans outstanding as of Dec 31, 2013). In fact, the direct federal loan program has been a huge source of competition for Sallie Mae.

In other words, since it’s no longer originating federal student loans (which used to be its biggest source of revenue), Sallie Mae will make more money if there are more private student loans (especially if those private student loans go to the students most likely to repay them. More on that in a minute).

From the Noel Levitz 2014 Discounting Report

Walter Hamilton:

Debbie Rohr lives with her husband and twin teenage sons in a well-tended three-bedroom home in Salinas.

The ranch-style house has a spacious kitchen that looks out on a yard filled with rosebushes. It’s a modest but comfortable house, the type that Rohr, 52, pictured for herself at this stage of life.

She just never imagined that it would be her childhood home, a return to a bedroom where she once hung posters of Olivia Newton-John and curled up with her beloved Mrs. Beasley doll.

Driven by economic necessity — Rohr has been chronically unemployed and her husband lost his job last year — she moved her family back home with her 77-year-old mother.

At a time when the still sluggish economy has sent a flood of jobless young adults back home, older people are quietly moving in with their parents at twice the rate of their younger counterparts.

George Anders:

Meet Alaric Blair, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher from Calumet City, Ill. He is strict, pleasant and ambitious. Right now, he’s taking advanced classes at Chicago’s Dominican University, hoping to recast himself as a school principal. It’s costing him $10,000 — and he has no desire to get tangled up in the current student-loan mess.

Anyone paying for higher education in the U.S. knows we’ve reached a financial crisis. Tuition keeps rising much faster than inflation. Going in debt to cover costs has become so common that education loans now exceed $1 trillion. Borrowers’ fates are shockingly inconsistent. Some graduates rapidly dig their way out of debt and enjoy better lives as fully accredited doctors, actuaries or the like. Others can’t finish costly programs or strike out in the job market, leaving them ill-served by easy credit. There’s no flexibility in this system: repayment schedules keep ticking.

Back in 1955, economist Milton Friedman argued in favor of financing education with variable-repayment systems that tied into students’ eventual earnings. Top earners would repay more. Dropouts and hard-luck cases would be treated more leniently. Modern-day researchers such as Miguel Palacios of Vanderbilt University continue to advocate equity-based financing, tied to a fixed percentage of future earnings. Yet such approaches exist mostly in academic white papers, rather than in the real world.

Minding the Campus:

For years, Washington has failed to make universities accountable to the students and taxpayers funding them. This failure was epitomized by the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, which forbade the Department of Education from creating a “student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time.” The bill, argued the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey, sought to “prevent public officials from asking honest questions about what, exactly, taxpayers are getting in exchange for their support.” Though both Republicans and Democrats have recently called for accountability measures on the federal side, it’s unclear that they’ll make progress anytime soon.

Where Washington has failed, however, Texas already has succeeded. When it comes to Texas public higher education, knowing the truth could make you free–debt-free, that is, or, if not entirely free of debt, perhaps less burdened with it than the average college graduate today.

Texas is credited with having “the most sophisticated and publicly available higher-education data set in the country.” In 2004, Governor Rick Perry signed an executive order which asserted that “the public has the right to demand complete accountability for its investment in institutions of education.” Accordingly, the order, entitled “Relating to accountability of higher education systems and institutions,” calls on the state’s public universities to “provide the citizens of Texas, the Governor, and the Legislature with the information necessary to determine the effectiveness and quality of the education students receive at individual institutions.”

This wasn’t just talk. Last year, the Texas Legislature passed Texas House Bill 1296, which requires the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to “prepare information comparing institutions of higher education in this state and post the information” on THECB’s website. This information is to be provided to any “public school student who requests the information.” The mandated information includes identifying “postsecondary education and career opportunities, including information that states the benefits of four-year and two-year higher education programs, postsecondary technical education, skilled workforce careers, and career education programs.”

Jay Matthews:

Walter Fields’s 15-year-old daughter is a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. She scored advanced proficient on state math tests in middle school and received an A in algebra in eighth grade.

For reasons that mystify Fields and his wife, their daughter was not recommended for the ninth-grade geometry course that would keep her on the track to Advanced Placement calculus her senior year. Only when they contacted the principal and the math department chair was she placed in that advanced course. The geometry teacher encouraged her dream to become an engineer. She had a B most of the year but slipped to a C because of the demands of lettering in basketball and track, her father said.

Now she is in a fix. Her Algebra 2 teacher made clear on Parents Night, her father said, that “she did not like school sports and suggested students needed to choose between being involved in a sport and being enrolled in her course.” The teacher has proved to be, her father said, very discouraging. His daughter has struggled.

“The teacher’s response to our questions regarding our daughter’s performance was ‘she just doesn’t seem to get it,’ ” Fields said. “When we pressed the teacher she curtly suggested that maybe this wasn’t the right class for our daughter.” Her geometry teacher was apparently so alarmed that she told Fields’s daughter to come see her if she needed help. Fields and his wife are well-educated African Americans. He thinks Columbia High is hindering his daughter’s progress because of her race. He and other parents are preparing to file a lawsuit on that issue. Fifty-six percent of Columbia students are black, but just 14.4 percent of AP calculus students in the 2011-12 school year were of that race. Seventy-three percent were white.

Michelle Singletary:

A year ago, I was where many parents are right now. My daughter Olivia was faced with the decision of where to attend college.

I’ll admit I was pretty adamant leading up to the choice that many families have to make by May 1, which is the deadline for accepted students to declare where they will attend college. No student loans. No debt for our daughter or us.

However, when Olivia started looking at schools that were out of our financial comfort zone, my husband and I realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought. Our daughter is a great student. She took advanced placement classes and participated in extracurricular activities. And when she said her “I’ll-be-crushed-if-I-don’t-get-in” school was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we began to get anxious.

We didn’t have enough saved to cover all the out-of-state expenses for four years at UNC. Absent any aid, the cost at UNC would have been more than $183,000, including tuition, fees, room, board, books and supplies, travel and personal expenses. And that figure doesn’t include the likelihood of price increases.

Still, how could we deny her heart’s desire? She swooned after a tour of the campus. She bought UNC paraphernalia. Even the school color — light blue — is her favorite color.

She didn’t get into her dream school. And honestly, we were relieved.

You might think it’s easy for us now to say we wouldn’t have let her go. Yet, trust me, we would have had to break her heart.

Her rejection made the decision of where she would go easier for us. But what if it’s not as easy for you? What if your child does have a choice, and that choice is beyond your means?

James Gallagher:

Mathematicians were shown “ugly” and “beautiful” equations while in a brain scanner at University College London.

The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by “beautiful” maths.

The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty.

The likes of Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity are rarely mentioned in the same breath as the best of Mozart, Shakespeare and Van Gogh.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience gave 15 mathematicians 60 formula to rate.

One of the researchers, Prof Semir Zeki, told the BBC: “A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain – the medial orbito-frontal cortex – like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music.”

The more beautiful they rated the formula, the greater the surge in activity detected during the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

“Neuroscience can’t tell you what beauty is, but if you find it beautiful the medial orbito-frontal cortex is likely to be involved, you can find beauty in anything,” he said.

Matt Bruenig:

I see it often claimed that the high rate of child poverty in the US is a function of family composition. According to this view, the reason childhood poverty is so high is that there are too many unmarried parents and single mothers, and those kinds of families face higher rates of poverty. The usual upshot of this claim is that we can’t really do much about high rates of childhood poverty, at least insofar as we can’t force people to marry and cohabitate and such.

One big problem with this claim is that family composition in the US is not that much different from family compositions in the famed low-poverty social democracies of Northern Europe, but they don’t have anywhere near the rates of child poverty we have.

Michael McDonald

At a Dowling College campus on Long Island’s south shore, a fleet of unused shuttle buses sits in an otherwise empty parking lot. A dormitory is shuttered, as are a cafeteria, bookstore and some classrooms in the main academic building.

“There’s a lot of fear here,” said Steven Fournier, a senior who lived in the now-closed dorm for his first three years. “It’s not the same college I arrived at.”

Dowling, which got a failing grade for its financial resources from accreditors last month, epitomizes the growing plight of many small private colleges that depend almost entirely on tuition for revenue. It’s been five years since the recession ended and yet their finances are worsening. Soaring student debt, competition from online programs and poor job prospects for graduates are shrinking their applicant pools.

Richard Vedder:

Here’s a scary statistic about American higher-ed: more than 40 percent of college students don’t graduate. But that number hides enormous variations in drop-out behavior. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has issued a “state supplement” report filled with interesting statistics; Here are some:

Completion rates are vastly lower for part-time students relative to full-time ones;

Students attending private schools are more likely to graduate than those at public institutions;

Far more two-year public college students fail to complete their degree than successfully do so;

Interstate variations in completion rates are large;

Roughly 20 percent of those completing schools graduate from an institution different than the one they originally attended, although that proportion is lower at four-year schools;

Those entering colleges right out of high school are much more likely to get a degree in six years than those who wait to attend college;
Women are more likely to complete school then men.

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

So, at about 4:30 in the afternoon on October 18, Dent, age 64, made his way off the porch and to the curb along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the West End of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Soon he could hear the first rumblings of the band.

There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital’s lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state’s largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers—young and old, black and white, old money and no money—crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.

Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South’s signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city’s two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent’s daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa’s daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central’s homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby black elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.

More: Share Six Words on Race & Education.

Related: Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage (18.3%) low income population. Nearby Cherokee Middle School’s low income population exceeds 60%!

The Madison School District (600K PDF):

This is the fourth and final installment of the series of updates designed to keep the board informed during the 2014-15 MMSD budget development process. The first update reviewed the budget process, priorities, and expected revenues. The second update explained our goals for a school-based staffing process that was more responsive to the needs of each school and its students. The third and most recent update explained our vision for reallocating at least $500,000 from central office accounts to schools’ non-personnel budgets. This update is a follow-up on that vision.

Zero-Based Budget Development: Central Office Departments
Throughout the 2014-15 budget process, we have remained focused on MMSD’s Strategic Framework, which emphasizes the importance of the work being done at each school, particularly as it relates to the School Improvement Plans (SIPs). We recognize that schools must have the support and resources needed to successfully implement their SIPs. At the same time, however, we are also faced with the limitations of the current school funding situation, which creates a finite pool of resources available to the district.

A key benefit of a zero-based approach to budget development is that it enables us to examine current resource distribution, identify district priorities, and then realign resources to support those priorities and student learning. Because the work of the central office is designed around the schools, our goal was to identify opportunities for redistributing resources from the central office departments to the schools with a targeted amount of $500,000 – $1,000,000.

Taking a collaborative approach to the process, we met with the leaders of each central office department to thoroughly review their existing budgets and find areas to create better efficiencies. Through this process, we were also able to improve their resulting budgets by aligning their resources with their actual budgetary needs and creating a cleaner set of accounts for them to use during the 2014-15 fiscal year.

After several rounds of meetings, we successfully identified $1,000,000 in the central office budgets that was available to be repurposed. We reallocated from accounts for supplies, travel, substitutes and temporary staffing, equipment and consulting services. Of the $1,000,000 amount, half will be used to fund locally staff that were previously funded, partially or wholly, by Title I[M1]

Related: Madison Schools 2013-2014 budget charts, background & missing data.

Matthew DeFour on Madison School Board Member and Gubernatorial Candidate Mary Burke:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Tuesday that if elected, she would eliminate the new statewide voucher program and private school tax deduction in the next budget.

Burke, a Madison School Board member, previously said she didn’t support the statewide voucher program.

In response to a question at a Wispolitics.com luncheon at the Madison Club about what she would cut in the next state budget, Burke went further, calling statewide vouchers “a new entitlement program we frankly don’t need.” She also identified the private school tax deduction as something she would cut.

“I respect people’s choice in making that, but I don’t think we should be subsidizing that choice,” Burke said, referring to sending children to private schools.

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign issued a statement in response to Burke’s comment.

“Gov. Walker believes every child, regardless of ZIP code, deserves access to a great education, and parents should have the right to choose the best educational environment for their children, whether it’s a public, private, charter or home school,” spokeswoman Alleigh Marre wrote in an email.

Both the tax deduction and the statewide voucher program were introduced in the 2013-15 budget signed by Walker.

Uppity Wisconsin on Mary Burke (October 2013):

o, yesterday, when Mary Burke finally made a promise and told the Wisconsin State Journal that, although she opposed Walker’s statewide expansion of vouchers, she nonetheless would do nothing to remove the statewide voucher program, jaws dropped throughout Wisconsin’s progressive community:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Monday she wouldn’t have expanded private school vouchers statewide, which Gov. Scott Walker did in this year’s state budget.

However, Burke said if elected she would keep the statewide program in place with a cap of 1,000 students and seek accountability for private schools receiving public funds in Milwaukee.

Vouchers a conservative entitlement program — John Skille

Elizabeth Warren’s Quiet Support for Public School Vouchers by Carrie Lucas:

If all goes right for Massachusetts Democrats in November, they will fill the seat once held by liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy with a school voucher supporter who has proposed radically reforming public education in America.

You won’t find a call for school vouchers on Elizabeth Warren’s campaign website. Education is listed first among the candidate’s top priorities, but the website sticks to safe, poll tested platitudes calling for “good public schools, good public universities, and good technical training” as the key to a having a competitive workforce.

Yet in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, Warren and co-author Amelia Warren Tyagi cite the traditional public schools system, in which children are assigned to a school based on their residence, as a key source of economic pressure for families with children. Warren and Tyagi call for system-wide reforms to break the link between where a child lives and where they go to school, and specifically make the case for a fully-funded voucher program that would enable children to attend any public school.

Sweden’s School Choice: Vouchers for All and “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”.

Carl Straumsheim:

he Maryland Higher Education Commission is cracking down on institutions that provide distance education to students in the state. But the commission has a problem: It doesn’t know who those distance education providers are.

The commission last month fired off letters addressed to presidents and provosts of institutions that offer fully online programs (seen at the bottom of this article), asking them to self-report if they enroll students in Maryland.

“As of July 1, 2012, higher education institutions offering fully online education to Maryland residents must submit an application to register with the Maryland Higher Education Commission,” the letter reads. “A review of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System has revealed that in 2012 your institution offered fully online programs and enrolled Maryland residents. If any of your current students are Maryland residents and are enrolled in fully online programs, the aforementioned regulation applies to your institution.”

After explaining how Maryland regulates out-of-state providers, the letter presents them with three options: Confirm that the institution enrolls students in Maryland, then pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 and a bond valued at five times the average cost of tuition; confirm that the institution is interested in enrolling students in Maryland, and pay the same fee; or decline any interest in enrolling students in Maryland, thereby barring those students from enrolling altogether.

D.D. Guttenplan:

Besides his name and email address Richard C. Levin’s new black-and-white business cards contain just two short lines of type: “Coursera” and “CEO.” Mr. Levin, the former president of Yale University, was named head of the online education company late last month.

With seven million registered users and 25 million course enrollments to date Coursera is the largest provider of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. A for-profit company, its main rivals include Udacity, another commercial firm, and edX, a nonprofit backed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But with its sole revenue stream coming from a small minority of students who enroll in its “Signature Track” — which charges a fee of around $50 to verify a student’s identity, and issues a certificate upon successful completion of the course — questions have been raised about how long its backers will have to wait to see a return on their investment.

In a recent interview, Mr. Levin predicted that the company would be “financially viable” within five years. He began by disagreeing with Andrew Ng, Coursera’s co-founder, who described Coursera as “a technology company.”

Orin Kerr:

I don’t find these suggestions very useful. First, don’t most schools already have these “new” courses? I’m most familiar with the curriculum where I teach, but we already have one or several courses in each of those named fields.

Second, I don’t see how the listed “problem-based” seminars are supposed to help. What legal issues do students study in their Word Peace class, and how does expertise in World Peace help students get jobs? Presumably students aren’t expected to practice World Peace law. And I assume no one expects that two-credit seminars will actually create world peace.

Third, if the problem with law schools is that students need these courses but don’t take them now, then the answer is to mandate these courses rather than simply offer them. At most schools, almost everything after the first year is an elective. Merely adding new electives that most students won’t take is at best a symbolic answer to the alleged problem.

Wisconsin State Journal:

First the good news: Reading scores in Wisconsin are improving.

The latest statewide test suggests 36.6 percent of students are proficient or advanced in reading, and 48.6 percent are proficient or advanced in math.

That’s up slightly from the previous year, with slow yet steady improvement over several years.

Let’s keep those scores going up.

Wisconsin also should stay committed to the higher state standards known as Common Core. Educators across Wisconsin have been preparing for Common Core for years. The Legislature wisely adjourned this spring without altering these important academic standards.

Common Core will make it much easier to compare the performance of Wisconsin students to their peers in other states and around the world. The state’s previous standards were vague and inadequately prepared students for college or career.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

John Ziker:

The days of the ivory tower are a distant memory. We may hear about them from our ancestors — our teachers’ teachers’ predecessors who lived in the days when social philosophers wrote voluminous comparative works and most teaching was done in small groups in the Socratic tradition. But my mentors also taught me to be wary of idealizing the past. Discrimination, sexism and exclusivity characterized those times. And the theories of human nature that social philosophers and historians expounded back then were biased as a result. No, the ivory tower is not some golden era to which academics are striving to return.

But one concept from those days of yore — the principle of academic freedom — remains hallowed in the minds of most scholars. Without academic freedom, it is likely that the spirit of inquiry and intellectual development would wither away under the ever-looming “bottom line.” Academic freedom is what keeps Homo academicans stomachs full and mental juices hot. Without academic freedom, higher education faculty would have all the drudgery without the satisfaction of discovery. We love what we do, and if we don’t, we get out.

Chris Stone

On 9 May 2013 I was stabbed in front of the US Embassy in Cairo. My attacker was a young college-educated Egyptian man who had come from his village that day to kill an American in “revenge over U.S. policies in the Middle East.” At the time, I was living in Egypt and conducting research as part of my sabbatical from Hunter College of the City University of New York where I teach Arabic. The day I was stabbed, I had come to the Embassy looking to have a translation of my marriage certificate authenticated so that my wife’s Egyptian residency permit might be renewed.

After the attack, a few Egyptian journalist friends wrote about the event, partly to rectify some of the early misreporting in the Egyptian press. The main shared goal of their articles, though, was to declare that my attacker could not have picked a less appropriate target, given my love of Arabic and Arab culture. These overly generous portrayals did not prevent me from asking myself very early on: was I really such an unsuitable target? Not that my attacker knew what I do for a living, but the thought crossed my mind that perhaps, someone out for revenge on US policy in the Arab and Islamic World after 11 September 2001 could do worse than inadvertently target a teacher of Arabic.

Gillian Tett:

A couple of decades ago Orin Starn, an American-based cultural anthropologist, went to Peru to conduct a study of a poor Andean community. It was a classic of the genre.

But since then Starn has made another important discovery: sometimes it is even more interesting to flip the lens and look at tribes in modern American life instead. He recently published a fascinating book on Tiger Woods, looking at golf as a cultural symbol. And as a self-styled “sport anthropologist”, who now works as professor at Duke University, North Carolina, he has also pondered the thorny question of lacrosse.

It is easy to see why. This week Bill Cohan, a banker turned journalist who has previously written exposés on Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, published an account of a 2006 scandal about rape allegations against Duke University’s male lacrosse team. And after reading his exhaustive, fascinating tale, The Price of Silence, the only thing that surprises me is that there are not more academics working in this nascent discipline of sports anthropology, given how much material there is to explore.

Richard Perez-Pena:

Marilyn Ferreira has solved her share of financial puzzles — running a business, buying a home and arranging a mortgage, raising six children as a single mother. But none of that compared to the challenge of understanding the cost of sending her brood to college.

She and her daughter Kelsey are in the thick of it now, weighing Kelsey’s admissions and financial aid offers from various colleges before the May 1 deadline, trying to make meaningful comparisons and just hoping they aren’t blindsided by something they missed. She has an important advantage in making sense of the terminology and the numbers: a lot of experience, with two sons now in college and a daughter already graduated.

“But it’s still confusing to me, probably the most confusing thing I’ve had to deal with,” said Ms. Ferreira, 48, a dance instructor who lives midway between Boston and Providence, R.I. “I couldn’t have figured it out on my own the first time, and I’m still not sure I could.”

It becomes clear over a long conversation that she does not understand how colleges define basic, crucial terms like “need,” “aid” or “need-blind admission,” and she does not know that those definitions vary from place to place. Her confusion is distressingly common, as demonstrated in studies, surveys and interviews with students and parents.

An array of policy analysts from think tanks to the White House say things should change. “It’s a ridiculously complicated system, if you can even call it a system, and a lot of people don’t get it,” said Sandy Baum, a research professor at George Washington University’s graduate education school, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a leading expert on college pricing. “If you put five aid offers from different colleges together, they’re all different, and it’s very, very difficult to compare. That problem could be solved.”

Related: Questions About Financial Aid?

Shaila Dewan:

For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.

The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. An analysis for The New York Times by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent — not including utilities — was more than 30 percent of the median gross income.

In Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31 percent, from a historical average of 21 percent. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35 percent from 14 percent. Zillow calculated the historical average using data from 1985 to 2000.

Nationally, half of all renters are now spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a comprehensive Harvard study, up from 38 percent of renters in 2000. In December, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan declared “the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known.”

Howard Blume:

A popular Los Angeles high school science teacher has been suspended after students turned in projects that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom.

Students and parents have rallied around Greg Schiller after his suspension in February from the downtown Cortines School of Visual & Performing Arts. Supporters have organized a rally on his behalf at the campus for Thursday, gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition calling for his reinstatement and set up a social media page.

Schiller was ordered to report daily to a district administrative office pending an investigation after two students turned in science-fair projects that were designed to shoot small projectiles.

One project used compressed air to propel a small object but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.)

Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. When the ninth-grader proposed it, Schiller told him to be more scientific, to construct and test different coils and to draw graphs and conduct additional analysis, said his parents, who also are Los Angeles teachers.

Jonathan Keats:

IN THE early 1990s, 14 computer scientists at the University of Maryland were sharing an 80-megabyte hard drive. The drive was often overloaded, with expendable files taking up space in neglected sub-directories. Finding anything was like blindly reaching along all the branches of an overgrown tree.

There had to be a better way, thought departmental professor Ben Shneiderman. So he wrote a six-line algorithm that visualised the drive as a rectangle. Vertical divisions split the rectangle into smaller ones, representing directories, which then subdivided horizontally to show subdirectories. Each of the smallest rectangles corresponded to a megabyte of storage space, so free space was visible at a glance.

He called his invention a “treemap”, and it was adopted by computer labs around the world. It soon found other uses, such as in an interactive chart of stocks and shares, still popular today.

These hierarchical treemaps “epitomize the recent growth of information visualization”, writes Manuel Lima in The Book of Trees: Visualizing branches of knowledge. And as big data engulfs labs and lives, the need for such powerful visualisations will only increase.

Tara Bahrampour:

When Paul Vaughn, an economics major, was in his third year at George Mason University, he decided to save money by moving off campus. He figured that skipping the basic campus meal plan, which costs $1,575 for 10 meals a week each semester, and buying his own food would make life easier.

But he had trouble affording the $50 a week he had budgeted for food and ended up having to get two jobs to pay for it. “Almost as bad as the hunger itself is the stress that you’re going to be hungry,” said Vaughn, 22, now in his fifth year at GMU. “I spend more time thinking ‘How am I going to make some money so I can go eat?’ and I focus on that when I should be doing homework or studying for a test.”

A problem known as “food insecurity” — a lack of nutritional food — is not typically associated with U.S. college students. But it is increasingly on the radar of administrators, who report seeing more hungry students, especially at schools that enroll a high percentage of youths who are from low-income families or are the first generation to attend college.

Student Union of Michigan:

On April 1, 2014, the University of Michigan announced on The University Record that its Chief Financial Officer Tim Slottow would become the new president of the for-profit University of Phoenix. It sounded so ridiculous that even Michael Proppe, the president of the Central Student Government (CSG) and someone who we don’t usually see eye to eye with, was convinced it was an April fools joke. What could the CFO of a public university like the University of Michigan possibly know about running a for-profit private university like the University of Phoenix? Wouldn’t it be hard for him to adjust to the logic of a for-profit (recently probed by the Senate) after spending 12 years working at an ostensibly public institution? If Slottow’s tenure at the University of Michigan is any indication, the answer is a resounding “No.”

The institution whose finances Tim Slottow was charged with managing is no longer public in any meaningful sense of the word. During Slottow’s tenure as CFO at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2014, one year of lower division undergraduate in-state tuition more than doubled, increasing from $6,395 to $12,948. If tuition had kept pace with inflation it would be about $8,346. Furthermore, the University has radically reshaped the student body, privileging wealthier students whose families can afford exorbitant out-of-state tuition while pricing out students from lower class backgrounds and Black, Latin@, and Native American students. There’s now more students at U-M whose parents make over $200,000 that there are students whose parents make less than $75,000.* Rich students want fancy facilities, so the university has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to expensive, unnecessary construction projects. The University now brings in over $1 billion in revenue each year from students’ tuition (just under half of which are paid for with loans).

Slottow’s management of the University’s finances, however, must have been even more attractive to the University of Phoenix’s board of trustees. His accomplishments are duly noted in the University’s press release:

Alan Borsuk

Jean Maier says she now realizes two of the important qualities needed to make progress in dealing with Milwaukee’s reading crisis:

Humility and tenacity.

One piece of good news is that she has seen them in action in places such as Gwen T. Jackson School, 2121 W. Hadley St., a Milwaukee public school where improvement in reading achievement is an urgent need. (How urgent? Scores improved this year so only 84.7% of students were rated below proficient in reading in state test results released last week.)

Another — and I hope broader — piece of good news is that the carefully constructed (which can be read as “slow aborning”) efforts of Milwaukee Succeeds are entering the action stage. In recent weeks, I visited three pilot programs associated with the everyone-at-the-table campaign by civic leaders to improve the lot of children in the city.

I liked what I saw, in terms of the projects. I was sobered by the depth of the problem, both when I watched kids struggle with reading basics and when I looked at the new wave of test results. But I did feel like a lot of care, commitment and intelligence is going into finding more effective ways of helping kids with reading. That is one of several major focal points for the Milwaukee Succeeds effort.

Two of the Milwaukee Succeeds pilots I visited focused on tutoring. There are a lot of people who want to help kids improve their reading, including volunteers ranging from college students to retirees. But, frankly, there have been two big problems with tutoring efforts citywide.

One is that they focus too much on kids who are actually doing OK and too little on those who really need help. The Milwaukee Succeeds folks have put together compelling data to show this.

Ann Larson:

WWhen I enrolled in the PhD Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center to study Composition and Rhetoric, I was idealistic about the future of the discipline and my own place in it. I believed that Comp and Rhet (as I came to call it) was asking crucial questions that were central to the mission of higher education in America. I still believe that. But, after working in the field in a number of full-time and part-time positions over several years, my idealism has turned to despair at what I now regard as Composition’s great shame. It has left me to doubt that there is a place in the field for me and for many others like me.

As anyone who teaches college writing is probably aware, the majority of such courses are taught by contingent faculty, including adjuncts and graduate students. These workers usually receive low wages and few benefits. (Some long-term CUNY adjuncts receive health care, but even this small benefit has recently come under attack.) This is not just a local problem. Recent data shows that adjuncts now earn a national average salary of just $2,758 per course, which means teaching eight to ten courses per year results in a salary of $22,064 and $27,500. These are poverty and near-poverty wages. More recently, Josh Boldt, who compiles information on the pay rates and overall treatment of adjunct faculty on his Adjunct Project blog, has confirmed in chilling fashion what we already know: many adjuncts have no access to benefits, no role in university governance, and are rarely told if they will have classes to teach from one semester to the next.

Playbook
 International Student Assessment (PISA) 1MB PDF.

The Wall Street Journal

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has a well-deserved rap as a taxpayer drain. So to rehabilitate its image, the pension fund has produced a “study” purporting that public-worker pensions are California’s biggest jobs generator. As if Californians needed more reason to doubt the pension behemoth’s math.

According to the 14-page analysis, “CalPERS benefit payments and investments in California are essential to the state’s economy” (Calpers’s bolded emphasis). For instance, Calpers “supports” 1.5 million jobs in the state. That figure includes every job at a California business in which Calpers invests including the 664 companies in its public equity portfolio like Google, GOOGL -1.63% Apple AAPL -0.74% and Walt Disney. DIS -0.65% Who knew that the public pension fund was essential to the survival of so many successful California public companies?

Calpers also notes that “the economic impact of CalPERS benefits far exceed initial taxpayer contributions.” Lo, the fund claims to return $10.85 in “economic activity” for every dollar taxpayers contribute, which would make public pensions the best government stimulus of all time.

Lindsay Gellman:

Not long after Molly Patterson tossed her cap in the air with her fellow Yale College Class of 2013 graduates, she found herself in a new and unfamiliar city far from the East Coast where she grew up.

Instead of returning home to Reston, Va., the 22-year-old had relocated to Houston for a chemical-engineering position at a large oil-and-gas company.

Though she worked with a real-estate agent through her employer’s staff-relocation service, Ms. Patterson also spoke with Houston natives and scoured real-estate sites like Zillow.com Z -6.97% and Trulia.com to get the lay of the land.

To meet people and begin to put down roots, she quickly joined a local weekly trivia-night group and signed up to audit a Chinese-language course at nearby Rice University.

Carolyn Geer:

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, 54 years old, didn’t have a lot of money growing up. What she did have was a role model in her father, Charles Schwab, who founded the brokerage firm that bears his name in a two-room office in 1971. “My dad was a struggling businessman until I was in my 20s,” she says.

As a teenager she worked (baby sitting, a paper route, secretary) and she saved—opening a savings account, moving back home after college to scrape together her first and last month’s rent and to buy herself a bed and a dresser.

And she is still working, now to impart the good money habits she learned first hand to those not fortunate enough to have role models like “Chuck.”

It’s no secret that financial illiteracy is rampant in the U.S., where less than one-third of the population can correctly answer three simple questions on interest rates, inflation and diversification, according to a study by Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington University School of Business. But the jury is still out on what, if anything, to do about it.

Michael Bernick:

It just matters that you go.
 
 This month, high school seniors across America are receiving college decision letters of acceptance and rejection. Many of these students, and their parents, will think that where they go to college will significantly affect their employment future.
 
 They think wrong. Today, whether you go to college retains some importance in your employment options. But where you go to college is of almost no importance. Whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.

Madison Teachers, Inc. via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Among the many excellent benefits available to MTI members, guaranteed by MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements, is the additional worker’s compensation benefit, i.e., benefits greater than those provided by Wisconsin Statutes.

Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker’s compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but the benefit does not begin until the 4th day of absence, and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI’s Collective Bargaining Agreements provide that one absent from work because of a work- related injury or illness will receive his/her full wage, and that it begins on day one of the absence. Further, MTI’s negotiated benefits for worker’s compensation are not limited by Wisconsin Statutes, i.e., there is no maximum. MTI’s Contracts also provide that one’s earned sick leave is not consumed by absence caused by a work-related illness or injury.

Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker’s Act 10.

Ian Johnson:

In December, China stunned the world when the most widely used international education assessment revealed that Shanghai’s schools now outperform those of any other country—not only in math and science but also in reading. Some education experts have attributed these results to recent reforms undertaken by the Chinese government. Jiang Xueqin has been active in Chinese education since 1998, when as a Yale undergraduate he taught for six months at one of the top high schools in China, Beida Fuzhong, or the Affiliated High School of Peking University.

A Canadian citizen whose parents emigrated from China, Jiang, who is thirty-seven, helped establish an experimental high-school program in Shenzhen in 2008 and now works for Tsinghua Fuzhong, Tsinghua University’s Affiliated High School. He just published a book in China called Creative China about his experiences in Chinese public schools. I spoke to him in Beijing in late March about the future of education in China.

Susan Headden (PDF):

PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHING is a profession in transition.
Already the largest occupation in the United States, it is expanding faster than the nation’s student population. Teachers of color are entering the profession at twice the rate of white teachers, reversing an exodus after civil rights victories opened many other doors to African Americans. And women are again entering the profession in greater numbers after years of bypassing the field for other opportunities.1

But what may be most significant—to students, schools, and the nation—is that teachers today are younger and markedly less experienced than a generation ago.2 Experts consider teachers with five or fewer years of experience to be still learning their craft.3 By the end of the last decade, more than a quarter of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers were in that category, compared to only about 17 percent in the late 1980s. Back then, the most common teacher in America was a 15-year veteran; two decades later, she was a first-year neophyte. 4 “The flow of new teachers,” says Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education who studies teacher trends, “has become a flood.”

Although the recent recession pushed back the tide somewhat, and has likely raised the level of experience, the sheer number of novices in public school teaching has serious financial, structural, and educational consequences for public education—straining budgets, disrupting school cultures and, most significantly, depressing student achievement.

Yet there has been scant discussion of the phenomenon by education policymakers. “I don’t know why everybody isn’t talking about this,” says Gail McGee, manager of new teacher induction for the Houston Independent School District. “It overwhelms me. Everybody, everywhere, is single-mindedly focused on the achievement gap, and nobody is spending any time talking about what potentially could be one of the biggest underlies of why we have one.”6

David Gurliacci:

Known as a P-TECH model school, the six-year academy is a collaboration with IBM, Norwalk Public Schools and Norwalk Community College.

Norwalk Early College Academy (NECA) will serve grades 9 to 14 and enable students to graduate with both a high school diploma and a no-cost Associate in Applied Science degree that will put graduates on the path to a good job.

Created by IBM and partners, P-TECH schools are innovative public schools that bring together the best elements of high school, college, and career. There are no tests or screening required for admission.

The new school in Norwalk will be located at the Norwalk High School, and graduates will be first in line for jobs at IBM.

“As Connecticut industry and government realign for the 21st Century, it has become clear that there is a skills gap in our national and state economies,” Governor Malloy said.

“However, Connecticut is home to many industries that will be growth and innovation sectors over the next 10 to 20 years, and we must prepare our students with the skills they need to succeed in that workforce.

Bryan Alexander

American higher education now seems to be recovering at last from the 2008 financial crisis. Some states are increasing their support for public universities and colleges. Backlash against the impact of budget cuts seems to have the idea of austerity down a peg, if not discredited it entirely, which might free up more budgetary room for governmental support of education. On the private side, institutional endowments are finally rising after years of stagnation and decline. Domestically, American college graduates still enjoy higher lifetime earnings than those with only high school experience. Internationally, the number of students traveling to study in the United States continues to grow.

But what if these cheerful data paint an inaccurate picture? What if a battery of other data points, driven by powerful forces, exerts pressure in the opposite direction, pushing American colleges and universities into contraction? Much like “peak car,” the demand for higher education may have reached an upper point, and started to decline. Like peak oil or peak water, it’s becoming more expensive and problematic to meet demand. As a thought experiment, let us examine these forces and consider this possible scenario under the header: Peak Higher Education.

Enrico Gnaulti:

Rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not creeping up so much as leaping up. New numbers just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that one in 68 children now has a diagnosis of ASD—a 30 percent increase in just two years. In 2002, about one in 150 children was considered autistic and in 1991 the figure was one in 500.

The staggering increase in cases of ASD should raise more suspicion in the medical community about its misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis than it does. Promoting early screening for autism is imperative. But, is it possible that the younger in age a child is when professionals screen for ASD—especially its milder cases—the greater the risk that a slow-to-mature child will be misperceived as autistic, thus driving the numbers up?

The science stacks up in favor of catching and treating ASD earlier because it leads to better outcomes. Dr. Laura Schreibman, who directs the Autism Intervention Research Program at the University of California, San Diego embodies the perspective of most experts when she says, “Psychologists need to advise parents that the ‘wait-and-see’ approach is not appropriate when ASD is expected. Delaying a diagnosis can mean giving up significant gains of intervention that have been demonstrated before age six.”

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez:

Southern California researchers are finding that foundations, set up to raise money for public schools, are reintroducing funding inequality that was supposed to be eliminated back in the 1970s, when the California Supreme Court ruled on the Serrano vs. Priest case.

“The court said spending needs to be equitable between school districts, you can’t have Beverly Hills spending twice as much as the other guys, per pupil, because a child’s education should not be dependent on the wealth of the area in which they happen to live,” said Cal State Fullerton professor Sarah Hill.

She and two colleagues have compiled information from about 1,500 education foundations and other fundraising groups such as booster clubs and PTAs, along with Internal Revenue Service data, to create a database Hill said is the first of its kind.

“We’re doing more of a sophisticated analysis looking at how wealth matters for which school districts are able to raise money. How demographics matter,” she said.

Some Northern California public school foundations are raising additional funds of about $2,000 per student. Researchers say that figure is a significant addition to the roughly $8,000 per student the state gives public schools each year. California’s current level of per pupil spending is the second lowest in the country.

Adam Liptak:

It was the last Monday in June, and the Supreme Court had just issued its latest decision on affirmative action. The debate was starting about how much the court had restricted the use of race in college admissions.

But Edward Blum, the legal entrepreneur who had orchestrated the case, wasted no time. He made a prediction that sounded a little like a threat.

“Those universities that continue using race-based affirmative action,” he said, “will likely find themselves embroiled in costly and polarizing litigation.”

It is now almost a year later. Admissions letters have just gone out, and there is no particular reason to think the court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas affected how students were selected. And the lawsuits Mr. Blum predicted have not materialized.

Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, said her race was held against her.Justices Step Up Scrutiny of Race in College EntryJUNE 24, 2013
There are reasons for that, Mr. Blum told me last week. One is that it is hard to find plaintiffs willing to call attention to having been rejected by a prestigious institution, to blame that rejection on race discrimination and to persevere through years of litigation.

Alyssa Abkowitz:

Chinese businessman Li Sheng is looking for a $900,000, four-bedroom home in Australia, where he hopes his two children will someday attend college. At this point, neither child has finished grade school—one is still in diapers—but Mr. Li hopes to buy a family home in Melbourne in the next year.

Mr. Li, who lives in Harbin, an industrial city in northern China, sees the purchase as a good investment in both his real-estate portfolio and his children’s future. While China has plenty of universities, he and other affluent parents say they want their children to experience life abroad, where the educational system is less rigid. “In Chinese families, the parents make the choice for their kids,” Mr. Li, 40, says. When his children get older, “I don’t want to make choices for them. I want them to do it themselves.”

In an effort to increase the likelihood of their children studying abroad, a growing group of Chinese buyers is snapping up high-end real estate in college towns around the world. Some Chinese buyers are using the properties to meet the universities’ residency requirements. Luxury homes also offer their children an upscale alternative to dorm life. Most important, many hope that real-estate purchases will help pay the costly university tuition.

Center on Reinventing Public Education, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Tennessee’s state-run Achievement School District (ASD) has again received high marks on its implementation of the portfolio strategy for managing and improving schools. New York City, Denver, and the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans also continue to lead among districts implementing these reforms.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington has released the new rankings as part of its work supporting a national network of over 40 portfolio school systems.

CRPE’s Portfolio Implementation Snapshot Tool rates each school system’s progress on portfolio reforms. The twice-yearly assessments are based on interviews with district or other system leaders and measure implementation progress on the strategy’s seven key components: good options and choices for all families, school autonomy, pupil-based funding, a talent-seeking strategy, new sources of support for schools, performance-based accountability, and extensive public engagement.

Districts can use the online tool to track progress (or lack of it) and see how they line up with best-in-class portfolio practices and other districts in the Portfolio School District Network. “These ratings show cities where they are and where they want to be,” says Christine Campbell, CRPE’s policy director. “The cities that invest the time in these interviews and bravely open themselves up for review are making a big step forward, whether they are currently at the top or the bottom of this list. In six months’ time, some of those just getting started will see big gains because they are becoming strategic about their work and actively making use of the network’s resources.”

Marni Bromberg & Christi Theokas (PDF):

Nationally, there are 61,250 students of color and 60,300 students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds who perform among the top 25 percent of all students in reading and math at the beginning of high school.

Many high-achieving students of color and students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, however, leave high school with lower AP exam rates, lower SAT/ACT scores, and lower GPAs than their high-achieving white and more advantaged peers — a reality that influences their choices beyond high school.

Schools can take action to better serve these students. Interviews with the principal of one successful school and with high-achieving students from around the country provide insight on what practitioners can do.

Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.

When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Charles Kenny:

It is college acceptance season, and letters with financial aid offers attached are dropping on doormats nationwide. Many students and an even greater number of parents are facing the sticker shock associated with tertiary education. As college prices rise—the average annual cost hit $18,497 in 2010-11, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—the question inevitably arises: Is it worth it? For the average student in the U.S. and worldwide, the answer is affirmative: Education remains a fantastic investment for individuals. The tougher question is whether education at all levels is such a great investment for societies as a whole.

In the U.S., education leads to higher wages. Median weekly earnings in 2013 were $472 for someone with less than a high school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number rises to $1,108 for those with a bachelor’s degree and $1,714 for those with a professional degree such as an MBA or J.D. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggested that the educational payoff for “marginal” college students—the ones who might not attend if it weren’t for government support, for example—may be a lot lower. Still, for most students, the high cost of college is well worth it.

That’s true worldwide as well. Recent estimates (PDF) for Ghana, for example, suggest that each additional year a child stays in school translates into an average annual income 7 percent higher. In China, that figure is 12 percent.

Q&A with Christopher Chatham:

It’s happens to all of us: times when we simply cannot stop ourselves mid-action, whether running a yellow (or red) light, making an inappropriate comment, or reaching for our buzzing phone during dinner. Most of the time, adults can overcome these impulses. Children, however, are notoriously different – most of the time seemingly incapable of curbing impulsive responses. New research suggests the problem is not an inability to stop but rather that they lack awareness of their environment.

Our ability to proactively monitor our surroundings is what allows us to stop mid-action, says Yuko Munakata of the University of Colorado Boulder, who will presenting new work at the CNS conference on Tuesday. She, along with Nicolas Chevalier of the University of Edinburgh and Christopher Chatham of Brown University, tested this idea in 7- to 9-year-olds, seeing if monitoring their environments improved their ability to subsequently stop behaviors compared to simply telling them to stop.

Chatham, who will be co-chairing the session at the CNS meeting about response inhibition, talked with CNS about this new research and how it fits into the big picture of differences between children’s and adults’ capabilities.

Harold Wilde:

College presidents—and I was one for 22 years—have few more thankless jobs than procuring (and that’s the right word) commencement speakers.

The expectation of graduates and their families is that a big-time speaker will be there to put the cherry on top of the sundae that was their college experience (and all those tuition dollars). So expectations are high. The ideal commencement speaker is a household name, has landed on the moon, won a Nobel Prize and a few NBA championships, was on the cover of last week’s People magazine … and will bring front-page publicity to the school (like George Marshall’s announcement of the Marshall Plan at Harvard’s 1947 commencement), forever glorifying their graduation day.

This is a fantasy, and the commencement speaker may be a tradition that long ago outlived its usefulness. But the college president, sharing the platform with the speaker, has no choice but to be personally involved. Few mistakes on his or her watch will be more visible, or more challenging to avoid, than the wrong commencement speaker.

Start with the constituents. At many schools, the students are polled every year on their preferred list of speakers. The ones you’ve heard of (probably less than half, e.g., the rap artists) either carry a speakers bureau charge of $25,000 to $100,000— or will cost you even more in the support you lose from your biggest donors. And, anyway, you have no money to pay for a commencement speaker. “The honor of the occasion, receiving an honorary degree, it should be enough.” Right! That may work in the Ivy League and at flagship state universities, but not at 3,400 other institutions across the country.

The Hechinger Report:

Here’s a modest test result to bolster the argument of those who say the American educational system isn’t so terrible. On a new creative problem-solving test taken by students in 44 countries and regions, U.S. 15-year-olds scored above the international average and rank at number 18 in the world. That’s much better than the below-average performance of U.S. students on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) reading and math tests conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“We think teaching through problem solving is already more developed in the US than in other countries,” said the OECD’s Pablo Zoido, in explaining why US students have higher problem-solving scores than expected.

Still, Asian countries and regions dominate the top 10 spots in creative problem solving, with Singapore, Korea and Japan taking first, second and third place. Canada, Australia and Finland were the only non-Asian nations to make it into the top 10. Shanghai, which topped the PISA charts in math and reading, was relatively weaker in problem solving at number 6.

Pew Research:

More moms are staying home: The share of mothers who do not work outside the home has risen over the past decade, reversing a long-term decline in stay-at-home mothers. (In the U.S. today, 71% of all mothers work outside the home.) Two-thirds are “traditional” married stay-at-home mothers with working husbands, but a growing share is unmarried.

2 Americans say a parent at home is best: Despite the fact that most mothers in the U.S. work at least part time, 60% of Americans say children are better off when a parent stays home to focus on the family, while 35% say they are just as well off when both parents work outside the home.

Can someone please tell me why this isn't more informative than the unemployment rate? pic.twitter.com/SaZoaDIQmG

— Amir Sufi (@profsufi) April 9, 2014

Related: Madison’s planned $39,500,000 fall property tax increase referendum.

Minding The Campus:

s students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that end, Minding the Campus asked a list of distinguished thinkers a straightforward question: should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down? Here are responses from Heather Mac Donald, Thomas Lindsay, and Samuel Goldman.

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute

We shouldn’t only be unhappy if the liberal arts are “going down.” We should be ashamed. Our highest duty as a civilization is to keep alive those works from the past that gave birth to our present freedoms and that constitute the most profound expressions of what it means to be human.

I see no evidence that a “critical evaluation” of the liberal arts is underway, beyond an ignorant flight on the part of some college students towards more allegedly marketable majors. This idea of a job-ready major is a fallacy; outside of vocational training and some select STEM fields, few majors, whether economics or philosophy, have a direct connection to most jobs.

But while the marketable major is an illusion, there is no question that the conceit is driving many students away from humanistic study. The irony is that colleges are themselves wholly responsible for endangering those fields that were once their very raison d’être. For it is their sky-high tuitions that are fueling this migration into purportedly more bankable fields and their adolescent politicization of the humanities that is failing to give students a reason to look back.

Tuition levels are the result of universities’ own decision-making–above all, their insatiable drive to expand their student services bureaucracy. No branch of that endlessly growing bureaucracy is more senseless and self-indulgent than the diversity superstructure, founded as it is on a demonstrable lie: that colleges are bastions of discrimination against minorities and females.