Jamie Redman:

students chessThe blockchain-based chess game took place during TU’s last semester, according to a recent Medium blog post written by student Paul Grau. It was deployed using Solidity and Ethereum developmental tools while students evaluated both positive and negative aspects of the platform.

The project was mentored by Christian Reitwiessner from the Ethereum foundation and the TU Department of Information Systems Engineering.

The team grew out of a group of students with programming skills and who chose the game chess due to its popularity in the computer science field. With a game that consists of 64 squares and two players controlling 16 pieces, the students had to apply “data structures for all of these, plus logic for making and verifying moves and end game conditions.” To demonstrate the attributes of an Ethereum distributed application, they also added methods for betting.

Anthony Gockowski

The University of Iowa could become the first school in the state to add a bachelor’s program in social justice to its list of degrees, provided its Board of Regents approves the motion.

Currently, the school already offers a first-year seminar on social justice as well as a “Justice for All” living learning community where students can live and “learn about systemic problems in our society.”

Richard Florida

In the book, you make a distinction between the complicated and the complex. What systems in cities do you think demonstrate that today?
 
 When something is complicated, it is intricate but often lacks the dynamics that makes a system hard to understand. On the other hand, a complex system implies feedback, a sensitive dependence on the initial conditions, and emergent phenomena that are hard to predict.
 
 At the level of urban infrastructure, we can see evidence of complex systems when things go wrong. When a water main breaks and vast portions of a city’s population receive water from a backup system (and have to boil their water, just in case), or when an outage can cause a city to be without power, we see the sensitivity of a city’s infrastructure and the vast complex system that operates for its population, which most of us are normally blissfully unaware of. Similarly, transportation networks, from a subway to the road networks, are also complex technological constructions that are difficult to fully grasp.

Eric Alderman:

he conservative movement in the United States has long been wary of higher education. This is understandable given the fact that survey after survey demonstrates a positive correlation between education and progressive values. Conservatives tend to attribute this phenomenon to mass brainwashing by elite liberal professors coupled with a conspiracy to blacklist anyone who tells what they consider to be the truth. Indeed, educated hucksters like David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes have made a tidy fortune from their gullible funders by hawking exactly this silly idea: smearing academics with McCarthyite tactics as they simultaneously complain about the communities of competence that struggle to maintain the integrity of their disciplines.

In addition to these mini-crusades, right-wing foundations and funders have enjoyed considerable dividends from the program of long-term investments they made in private universities beginning in the 1970s, when a bunch of them decided that the entire edifice of public knowledge was titled against their worldview. More recently, however, the far right has turned its attention away from these elite-oriented universities to public ones. Instead of seeking to change the minds—and hiring practices—of the Harvards and Stanfords of the world, they are now seeking to undermine the intellectual standards of state universities across America. They are doing this by persuading Republican-controlled state legislatures and governorships to pass massive cuts in funding while attacking the very foundations of higher education. The new demand is that public universities should be treated as any corporate entity, to be judged not as a social good but exclusively on its bottom line. (I should probably mention that I teach in a public university and that my daughter is beginning her freshman year at another this fall.)

Steven Pearlstein:

When I assigned an 800-page biography of Andrew Carnegie for a new undergraduate course on wealth and poverty at George Mason University a few years ago, I wasn’t sure the students would actually read it. Not only did most of them make it to the end, however, but many thanked me for giving them the chance to read a popular work of history. Curious, I inquired how many were history majors. Of the 24 honors students in the seminar, there were none. English? Philosophy? Fine arts? Only one. How was this possible? I asked. Almost in unison, half a dozen replied: “Our parents wouldn’t let us.”

The results were similar when I surveyed freshmen in another honors seminar this spring. This time, I asked how many would have been humanities majors if the only criteria were what they were interested in and what they were good at. Ten of the 24 raised their hands.

I was aware, of course, of the drift toward pre-professionalism on college campuses, of widespread concern over student debt, of stories about college-educated baristas living in basements, of governors threatening to cut off state funding for French literature and anthropology. Even so, I found it shocking that some of the brightest students in Virginia had been misled — by parents, the media, politicians and, alas, each other — into thinking that choosing English or history as a major would doom them to lives as impecunious schoolteachers.

Malcolm Harris:

Imagine you run a public high school with a middling reputation. You struggle with getting poor kids to engage and graduate as well as convincing rich families not to make use of private alternatives. It’s either come up with a low-cost gimmick or risk being labeled an unemployment factory and expose your belly to the talons of charter school “reformers.” Staying the course is not an option.

At one high school just outside of Washington, D.C., they chose the gimmick — a theme for the school that’s buzzy and also represents the only category of federal jobs still growing: terrorism and the prevention thereof. For her book A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools, University of Illinois–Chicago education professor Nicole Nguyen embedded in the school’s homeland security program, chatting up administrators, teachers, and students under the guise of studying their innovative approach (rather than their scary warmongering, which is closer to the truth). Nguyen didn’t expect to like what she found, but I can’t imagine there’s any critic of American education or the United States military who wouldn’t still be surprised by what’s happening at the school Nguyen pseudonymously refers to as Milton.

Amber Athey:

The “Language Matters” website includes a presentation similar in nature to the flyer, outlining the “big impact” of “little things” and providing examples of the three types of microaggressions.

A microassault may include “avoiding someone,” for instance, while an example of a microinsult is telling someone they are strong for a girl. A microinvalidation, meanwhile, could involve asking an Asian or Latino person where they are from.

Simply avoiding offensive language, however, is not enough according to Rutgers, which claims that microaggressions can also be “nonverbal” and “environmental,” but fails to elaborate further.

Rutgers also has a Bias Prevention Education Team that handles reports of microaggressions and other “bias incidents,” which experienced a surge of reports after alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos visited campus last semester, the anonymous student claimed. Liberal students memorably protested the event by covering themselves in fake blood, but still complained vehemently that the university had tolerated what they deemed “hate speech.”

Tony Messenger

Yellow tape marks the drinking fountains in 30 St. Louis Public Schools as off-limits, denying students even a sip of water.

In the wake of the lead-poisoning crisis in Flint, Mich., this summer, officials here tested the water at their schools, many of them decades-old buildings in need of repair. Some, like Mann Elementary and Patrick Henry Downtown Academy, had results bad enough to necessitate an immediate shut-off of the drinking fountains; more than a dozen schools had at least one reading four or five times the readings recorded in Flint homes. The district shipped in bottled water. At other schools, like Gateway Middle, there was at least one test that exceeded the 10-parts-per-billion threshold set by the district, but administrators determined that there was enough clean water available elsewhere in the school to keep most of the taps running. At Gateway, teachers took matters into their own hands and are bringing bottled water in on their own.

[Watch: Flint mayor says city’s infrastructure is ‘broken’]

About 19 minutes away, at Reed Elementary School in Ladue, in the 63124 Zip code that often ranks as one of the wealthiest in the country, the water will be cold and clean. In fact, thanks to a “naming opportunities” initiative, the drinking fountain there might soon find itself inscribed with a generous donor’s name — a reminder to thirsty students that they live in a place where clean water is a privilege.

City of Milwaukee:

The City of Milwaukee is seeking proposals from qualified consultants to provide management oversight services to the Charter School Review Committee (CSRC) as specified in Chapter 330-27 of the Milwaukee Code of Ordinances, including but not limited to board meeting attendance, school visits/monitoring, drafting reports to the CSRC, and review and administration services.

Julie Makinen

For more than a century, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity, confusion and even a fair bit of ridicule — after all, how do you type a language that has no alphabet?

On “The Simpsons,” smarty-pants Lisa was confounded by an imaginary one that featured countless buttons covered in complicated-looking characters. One of hip-hop artist MC Hammer’s frenetic, high-stepping dance routines was nicknamed the “Chinese Typewriter” because its furious moves supposedly mimicked the flailing that would be required of a Chinese typist trying to quickly hop about a massive keyboard.

Michael Halls-Moore

In the first year we discussed the basics – Linear Algebra, Ordinary Differential Equations, Real Analysis and Probability. In the second year we built on those basics, studying Metric Spaces, the Riemann Integral, Group Theory and calculus on Vector Spaces.

In the third year of a four-year masters-level course, especially one with an applied focus that will be of interest to quants, we need to begin thinking about more abstract concepts that will prepare us for study of Stochastic Calculus, Probabilistic Machine Learning and Bayesian Econometrics.

With that in mind it is essential that we study topics such as Measure Theory and Linear Functional Analysis.

Both of these courses contain ideas that underlie Probability Theory, Time Series Analysis and some aspects of Machine Learning. Measure Theory teaches us about generalising the Riemann Integral to the Lebesgue Integral, while Linear Functional Analysis discusses function spaces, many of which are necessary for solutions to certain Partial Differential Equations.

Alex Scarborough:

A Florida support staff member paces near the 50-yard line, staring across the field of the Georgia Dome. It’s December and the SEC Championship Game will begin in an hour — No. 18 Florida vs. No. 2 Alabama. Players from both teams warm up, yet it’s not an athlete who has this young, up-and-coming coach’s attention. He looks over at the opposing sideline and marvels at the size of the crimson-clad throng of coaches at Nick Saban’s beck and call. (The size of Saban’s armada grew again this week with the hiring of former USC coach Steve Sarkisian as an analyst.)

Alex Tabarrok:

Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates than the less educated so why are college students at Occupy Wall Street protests around the country demanding forgiveness for crushing student debt? The sluggish economy is tough on everyone but the students are also learning a hard lesson, going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

Dhawal Shah

But as course providers learned more about student behavior in online courses, MOOCs have evolved to meet the needs of the student. These needs include shorter courses with soft deadlines (i.e making it possible to submit assignments anytime before the end of the course, rather than having weekly hard deadlines).

Kadenze, a MOOC platform optimized for arts education, made such a switch recently. After the switch, the platform got more submissions in one month than in the whole of 2015 (Kadenze launched in mid June 2015), according to CEO Ajay Kapur.

But the biggest change to MOOCs in recent times has been that they have become more available. In other words, the number of courses that users can start immediately has risen significantly, as you can see in the graph below. (The graph shows the number of courses that a learner could start in September of each year. I chose September because it’s usually the biggest month for MOOCs.)

The Lighthouse

Are American universities approaching “Peak Administrative Bloat”? Some might think so. Consider the following job titles and salary estimates: “Principal Assistant Chancellor of the Office of Strategic Dining Technology, $180,317”; “Associate Executive for the Task Force on Donor Climate, $368,186”; “Assistant Provost for Athletic Maintenance to the Subcommittee for Neighborhood Outreach, $415,314.” Fortunately, those are just make-believe cases taken from the University Title Generator, but you get the point. The joke sounds plausible because it reflects the perception of an underlying reality: administrative bureaucracies and salaries have grown significantly, according to Independent Institute Research Fellow Vicki E. Alger, author of Failure: The Federal Misedukation of America’s Children.

Administrative bloat is one reason that college tuitions have climbed. Research costs are another—and reducing them would ease the student-debt burden. “Shrinking the ranks of nonteaching research faculty and putting professors back to work teaching would help undergraduates access the courses they need while saving them $2,000 to $3,000,” Alger writes.

Tim Harford

Tast week the British university system offered a record number of places. That sounds like good news — but do we really need more people to go to university? For that matter, does the world need more universities?

The answer feels like it should be yes. Education is good, is it not? But everything has a cost. Education takes time. We could insist that everyone study full-time until the age of 45 but that would surely be too much. And if that’s too much, perhaps half the population studying until they’re 21 is also too much. As for universities, they consume financial and intellectual resources — perhaps those resources might be better spent elsewhere.

My own personal bias is strongly in favour both of going to university, and of simply having universities around. Since the main skill I learnt at university was to write about economics, and I use that skill every day of my professional life, even an abstract education seems practical to me.

Mark Oppenheimer:

Twenty years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, the graduate students embarked on a two-week “grade strike,” during which they refused to hand in the fall grades of the undergraduates they were teaching. Grades were due on January 2, 1996, but the grad students, then as now agitating for union recognition, withheld the grades until two weeks later, when it became clear that they were losing the battle on all fronts. The dean of the graduate school brought three union leaders up on disciplinary charges (one was dismissed, though the other two had their punishments overturned); some faculty members threatened graduate students with reprisals, like poor letters of recommendation; and the Yale undergraduates, for whom a transcript without grades was like a scull without oarsmen, turned viciously on their teaching assistants.

That spring, a writer for the late, great small magazine Lingua Franca went to Yale and found that even campus liberals hated the grad-student-union movement. “They undertook an obligation and reneged,” the president of the Yale College Democrats told the reporter. “They’re holding the grades hostage of people they have no beef with.” Farther down in the article, the same student was in high snark mode: “It’s hard to tell an undergraduate who’s in debt $27,000 a year that your $10,000 stipend and full-tuition waiver isn’t enough,” he said. “You could argue that there is no one more privileged than the graduate students.”

Alexandra Leon

Faculty members at Long Island University’s campus will be locked out of the school starting Friday night after their contract with the university expired — as the school plans to borrow staff from other campuses to teach upcoming classes, the union says.

Starting at midnight, unionized members of the LIU Faculty Federation (LIUFF) won’t be allowed on campus after the university refused to accept terms of a new contract that would have increased pay to match that of their Long Island colleagues.

When classes start on Sept. 7, staff members from LIU’s Brooklyn campus and Post campus on Long Island will be taking over classes for full-time and part-time faculty members, according to LIUFF Vice President Ralph Engelman.

Henry:

There’s something basically right with the idea that universities (in the social sciences and humanities) should be in the business of making their students uncomfortable with their preconceptions, obligng them to examine their own and others’ ideas forcefully, and getting them to acknowledge a la Max Weber that there are awkward facts for every political position. But there’s also something fundamentally wrong with the claim that the ideal of academic freedom and the idea of the safe space are opposed to each other.

One of these days, we may see Susanne Lohmann’s book on how universities think. But in the meantime, there are some helpful insights in the essays that are supposed to provide one bit or another of her argument. In particular, this piece, which argued, a decade ago, that the university was nothing more and nothing less than a congeries of safe spaces for faculty, who otherwise would be at each others’ throats.

Cameron Okeke:

The University of Chicago sent a dizzying letter to its freshman class last week, pledging its allegiance to two principles: academic freedom and freedom of expression. The letter expressed this commitment by denouncing “so-called trigger warnings” and “intellectual ‘safe spaces.’” To those unfamiliar with the UChicago’s abysmal campus climate, a strong stance against echo chambers may seem reasonable. But marginalized students know that this declaration ignores the real problems on campus: sexual assault, racial profiling, and other troubling issues.

I would know. During my four years as an undergraduate at UChicago from 2011 to 2015, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the university’s willful ignorance of students’ concerns, especially students of color. As a first-generation black student, I needed safe spaces like the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs — not to “hide from ideas and perspectives at odds with my own,” but to heal from relentless hate and ignorance, to hear and be heard. My ideas were always challenged, but never my humanity. I mattered.

Full of robust dialogue, safe spaces are not a bubbled-wrapped echo chamber, but a places where “civility and mutual respect” actually matter. Though spacious, the multicultural student affairs office was always full of students sharing their struggles and grappling with oppression. Underfunded and understaffed, it was a house-turned-sanctuary for students and student groups alike. I even slept there during a particularly brutal finals week. I, like many other students, wouldn’t have survived UChicago without this place to call my home.

Erika Price:

Today, news broke that the University of Chicago had issued a letter to all incoming Freshmen warning that the school is not a “safe space” and that students should expect to be “challenged”. Most notably, UofC came out against the use of “trigger warnings”, brief content advisories that sometimes are placed on syllabi or lecture slides to alert students to potentially upsetting material.

Robby Soave

It’s called the Sanford Safe Space, and it will be a special room on campus where students can come when they need to “heal.” A social worker will be present.

That’s according to The Duke Chronicle, which notes that the room was conceived of by the Duke public policy school’s Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. Kathryn Whetten, a global health professor and co-chair of the committee, offered her own office as the physical location of the safe space. The idea is to provide a safe, healing space where all sorts of people can feel good about themselves, including students of color, military members, and even conservatives.

Rosalind S. Helderman and Michelle Ye Hee Lee

The guest list for a private State Department dinner on higher- education policy was taking shape when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a suggestion.

In addition to recommending invitations for leaders from a community college and a church-funded institution, Clinton wanted a representative from a for-profit college company called Laureate International Universities, which, she explained in an email to her chief of staff that was released last year, was “the fastest growing college network in the world.”

There was another reason Clinton favored setting a seat aside for Laureate at the August 2009 event: The company was started by a businessman, Doug Becker, “who Bill likes a lot,” the secretary wrote, referring to her husband, the former president.

Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.

Joe Myers

At the top of the table are countries that offer an “economic citizenship” programme, which confer citizenship after a minimal qualifying period. Although many of these have been in place for some time, there has been a recent surge in applicants and capital inflow, according to the IMF.

The cheapest option is Dominica, where you can become a citizen for a US$100,000 investment (plus fees) and an in-person interview, according to the BBC.

The rest of the table is devoted to the residency programmes in place around the world. Many of these have been adopted in recent years by larger European nations (though the United States and United Kingdom have had systems in place since the early 1990s).

Edwin Rios

During his four years as a football player at the University of Miami, Ryan Hill remembers getting several concussions. Six years later, Hill says he still feels the consequences—acute headaches, depression, mood swings, and more. So do at least 23 other former players across the country, according to a growing batch of lawsuits filed since May against major football conferences, the NCAA, and, in some cases, the schools themselves.

The 24 lawsuits allege that before 2010—when the NCAA approved legislation forcing schools to create guidelines for dealing with concussions—universities, athletic conferences, and the NCAA knew or should have known the risks associated with playing football but failed to inform student-athletes and implement policies to protect them. They “actively concealed this information to protect the very profitable business of ‘amateur’ college football,” the lawsuits allege.

Leslie Brody

Newark public school officials said Friday they handed out $1.7 million in bonuses to 283 top teachers, part of a groundbreaking contract for performance pay.

Merit pay began in the city schools as part of a 2012 contract that was funded in part by a $100 million grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said he hoped to make Newark a model for turning around a troubled school system.

The contract’s provision to give financial incentives for strong classroom performance was unusual: Teachers unions often balk at bonuses, saying they cause dissension and competition among colleagues who need to collaborate. Teachers typically get increases for longevity and other accomplishments, such as earning advanced degrees.

In Newark, where teachers deemed effective get raises for longevity and other factors, this year’s bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $12,500. The highest ones went to three teachers who worked in hard-to-staff subject areas in the most struggling schools. Officials in the state-operated district said these bonuses helped with its efforts to retain talent, and this year they were funded from the district’s budget.

It is unclear whether the merit pay plan will continue. The Newark Teachers Union and district are in negotiations over a new contract to replace the one that expired in June 2015. Union president John Abeigon said merit pay remained in the draft language, but in order for it to remain he wanted the district to say where the money would come from. Mr. Abeigon said his priority was getting raises across the board and retroactive increases for the past year.

“Don’t talk poverty to me with one mouth and then tell me with a separate tongue we will have millions to give” on performance bonuses, he said.

A spokesman said the district didn’t discuss contract negotiations, rewarding top teachers is a priority, and the bonuses represent just a small piece of a nearly $1 billion budget.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocco:

This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.

Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:

I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.

Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in, and the government treachery it revealed, is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students—and all the rest of us—should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.

Morgan Winsor

Kelly Elementary School in Holyoke has banned homework for the year with the intention of giving students all the instruction and extra help they may need during the school day.

“We want kids to go home tired; we want their brains to be tired,” Jackie Glasheen, principal of the school, whose kindergarten through 8th-grade students are nearly all poor and Hispanic, told ABC News. At home, she said, “we want them to engage with their families, talk about their school days and go to bed.”

Kristina Rizga

One spring morning this year, Darlene Lomax was driving to her father’s house in northwest Philadelphia. She took a right onto Germantown Avenue, one of the city’s oldest streets, and pulled up to Germantown High School, a stately brick-and-stone building. Empty whiskey bottles and candy cartons were piled around the benches in the school’s front yard. Posters of the mascot, a green and white bear, had browned and curled. In what was once the teachers’ parking lot, spindly weeds shot up through the concrete. Across the street, above the front door of the also-shuttered Robert Fulton Elementary School, a banner read, “Welcome, President Barack Obama, October 10, 2010.”

John Hagel:

What better time to reflect on the future of work and jobs than Labor Day? I’ve written about this extensively with my latest foray on a recent blog post.

Is STEM our future?

Today, I want to be a contrarian. The conventional wisdom is that the best way to prepare students for the future of work is through a STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math), although a few might recommend STEAM (adding art as a token concession to the quantitative basket). Let me challenge this on several levels.

First, it maintains a disciplinary focus to education at a time when our disciplinary boundaries are becoming prisons that prevent us from fully understanding the rapidly changing world around us.

Second, it suggests kids should go into disciplines that are particularly vulnerable to automation, especially if we focus on the quantitative and systemic dimensions of these disciplines. Sure, data analysts are in hot demand now, but how long will it be before artificial intelligence automates much of this activity? Robots are already designing and building their compatriots.

Mike Rowe

Last week, my personal toilet at mikeroweWORKS Headquarters coughed up a disgusting clog of bad advice, noxious bromides, and odorous stereotypes, leaving my entire office awash in the horrific stench of myth and nonsense. With no licensed plumbers on hand, I was forced to address the problem myself, pulling each offending fallacy from it’s cardboard tube of allegorical poo, and confronting it with a mix of government statistics and righteous indignation. As always, my objective was twofold – to shine a light on America’s widening skills gap, and debunk the growing perception that “all the good jobs are gone.” This latest effort is called “Hot Under the Blue Collar,” and it was sponsored by One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, and Mister Sparky Electric. Like so many other companies who rely on a skilled workforce, the people who own home service businesses are struggling to find the next generation of tradespeople who will keep our lights on and our pipes clear. Right now, thousands of good jobs – literally thousands – exist within these three companies alone. But no one seems to want them, and the reasons have nothing to do with low pay, poor benefits, or a lack of available training. They have more to do with the metaphorical miasma of misinformation currently clogging my commode. Consider:”>Mike Rowe

Tamara Hiler and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky:

Public colleges and universities play an essential role in unlocking the doors of higher education for many Americans. Today, more than 6.8 million students attend four-year public institutions, making up nearly two-thirds of the entire bachelor’s degree-seeking population in the United States.1 Close to two-thirds of all students attending these schools take out student loans in order to finance their education, with the average loan-holding student finding themselves more than $20,000 in debt four years later.2 And American taxpayers spend more than $10 billion dollars a year on federal Pell grants to help more than 2.7 million low- and moderate-income students attending these institutions afford a postsecondary education.3

This investment is one most Americans are willing to make—in part because of the irrefutable economic benefits gained in our modern economy by those who earn a college degree.4 But our analysis of the Department of Education’s College Scorecard data reveals that not all four-year public schools are giving students, or taxpayers, a good return on their investment. In fact, at many of these institutions, first-time, full-time students are not graduating, a large number are unable to earn wages higher than the typical high school graduate, and many cannot pay back the loans they’ve taken out.

While rising costs continue to drive the conversation around higher education in our country, this report and our previous analysis of four-year private, non-profit colleges raise much more fundamental questions beyond sticker price. With outcomes like these, it is clear that simply addressing the rising cost of college isn’t sufficient to ensure students are being equipped with the degrees and skills they need to succeed.

Among our key findings:

Jason Willick:

s the Obama era comes to a close, two political movements that were once confined to the margins of public discourse are elbowing their way further and further into the mainstream.

The first, a type of aggressive identity politics on the left that can be loosely described as political correctness, had been incubated in academic gender and ethnic studies departments for decades, but burst into the public consciousness like never before in 2015 as college students started shouting down speakers, demanding protection from disagreeable ideas, and otherwise engaging in illiberal antics that earned widespread coverage in the mainstream press.
PC is making its mark in elite culture outside of the Ivory Tower, too. As Jonathan Chait wrote in his blockbuster essay on the phenomenon early last year:

Dr Emmanuel Martin

In October 2008, when United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson bailed out several large financial companies, including his former employer Goldman Sachs, with taxpayers’ money, many raised their eyebrows and spoke of crony capitalism. There have been many such instances in recent years.
Cronyism is not straightforward corruption – although it can easily slip into it. It can be defined as the private use of personal connections to obtain favors from politicians and powerful officials, who receive benefits in return and become cronies. The incestuous relationship between economic and political power is made of “revolving doors” and favors exchanged between the private and public sectors.

MJ Lawler:

My older son came home from day 2 of 7th grade today. As we chatted about his day at school he told me that they wrote “math biographies” in math class today. I didn’t press him on what he talked about in his bio, instead I thought it would be fun to use the same idea for a short set of math videos tonight.

Here’s what my older son had to say about his “math biography”

Favorite topics he’s learned about so far: higher dimensions and 3d printing

Topic he’s excited to learn: trigonometry (which he thinks is advanced geometry)

Fun sort of one-off project we’ve done: Creating the 120-cell

Mary Esch

Jeremy is the home-schooled child of two aerospace engineers who were living in Grand Prairie, Texas, when he applied to Cornell. While Jeremy’s elite-level SAT and Advanced Placement test scores in math and science at age 10 showed he was intellectually ready for college, Collins said what sealed the deal was his parents’ willingness to move to Ithaca. Jeremy’s father, Andy Shuler, transferred from Lockheed Martin in Texas to its location in upstate New York.

“I wanted to make sure he had a nice, safe environment in terms of growing up,” Collins said.

James Mollison.

Vanderbilt University fine arts gallery.

Alan Borsuk:

I once sort of believed in miracle school superintendents. If you just got a spectacular person to head a school system, there would be real improvement.

I’m more jaded now. I’ve seen superintendents come and go in Milwaukee Public Schools and I’ve followed what has happened in school districts across the nation. Superintendents rarely spark much improvement. A great one is valuable, but, as a rule, no one person has that much impact.

This said, I suggest that Darienne Driver is very important to MPS, and if MPS is to navigate with reasonable success some difficult waters ahead, Driver’s work will be crucial. That includes her potential role in dealing with Republicans in the Legislature who are likely to have proposals to change MPS, come next spring.

After two years as superintendent and four years in Milwaukee, Driver is the one person connected to MPS who just about everyone praises. From left to right, from union leaders to civic and business leaders to politicians of both parties, people speak highly of Driver. Lip service? In some cases. But it’s better than what most anyone else connected to MPS gets.

Nick Wingfield

Dozens of allies threw their weight behind Microsoft on Friday in a case that challenges law enforcement’s use of secrecy orders to cloak its pursuit of digital communications in investigations.

Amazon, Google, Snapchat, Salesforce and several others filed a brief on Friday in support of Microsoft in its case against the United States Justice Department, while Apple, Mozilla and others made their own filing. Civil liberties groups and media organizations like Fox News, National Public Radio and The Washington Post submitted their own briefs.

Microsoft was also backed by a collection of law professors and a group of former United States attorneys who worked in the Western district of Washington, where Microsoft filed its federal lawsuit in April.

Emily Deruy

Are American colleges supposed to prepare future citizens for civically engaged adulthood? Or is their job to provide student consumers a market-driven good so they’re capable of becoming productive participants in the economy?

That’s the framing of a debate about the future of higher education in the new film Starving the Beast, which explores both the view—generally proffered by liberals and schools that rely on taxpayer support—that higher education in the U.S. is a public good to be supported by society, and the counter narrative—backed by conservative think tanks and policy wonks—that it is a cost to be shouldered primarily by individual degree-earners and private entities (who will presumably benefit in the long run).

The Education Department has been increasing pressure on the multibillion-dollar career-training industry, responding to complaints that some for-profit colleges burden students with debt and leave them without promised skills and jobs.

On Tuesday, the department got a pushback. The owner of a chain of colleges, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, filed an unusual lawsuit in federal court accusing education officials of pursuing a political agenda. The suit argues that the department is trying to put the colleges out of business by failing to classify them as nonprofit educational institutions, curbing their access to federal student aid dollars.
The department declined to comment on the suit.

Created in 2006 as a charity dedicated to promoting free-market principles throughout the higher education industry, the Center for Excellence bought several colleges, including Stevens-Henager, California College and CollegeAmerica, six years later from their founder, Carl B. Barney. Nearly all of the money for the $636 million purchase came from donations and loans made by Mr. Barney, an entrepreneur and ardent devotee of the capitalist evangelist Ayn Rand.

Tax Foundation

Taxation of Wage Income in the United States

There are two major types of taxes that wage earners in the United States pay. First, individual income taxes are levied by federal, state, and sometimes, local governments to fund the general operations of government. Second, governments levy payroll taxes on both employees and the employers, though the economic burden of both ultimately falls on wage earners. Payroll taxes are dedicated to funding programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance funds.

Laurent Haug

A few years ago, I sat down with the CEO of a 40,000-people company and asked him to list the skills he thought would be needed in a digital, data-driven future. He mentioned programmers, designers and online marketing specialists. I then asked him to list the skills his company had on the payroll. The difference was painfully obvious.
 
 For those whose training is becoming obsolete, and organizations needing completely new skills in a short amount of time, the transition will be complicated. As the author Alvin Toffler once predicted, the future belongs to those who can unlearn and relearn.
 
 History tells us that technology creates more opportunities and jobs. The state of the world might look confusing and worrying, but it is not. Virtual or tangible, automated or humanized, work is changing in many ways, but the fundamentals remain: acquiring skills and doing things that people need.

William Galston:

The populist revolt against governing elites sweeping advanced democracies is the latest chapter in the oldest political story. Every society, regardless of its form of government, has a ruling class. The crucial question is whether elites rule in their own interest or for the common good.

In the decades after World War II, the ruling classes in Western Europe and the U.S. managed their economies and social policies in ways that improved the well-being of the overwhelming majority of their citizens. In return, citizens accorded elites a measure of deference. Trust in government was high.

These ruling classes weren’t filled by the traditional aristocracy, and only partly by the wealthy. As time passed, educated professionals assumed the leading role. Many came from relatively humble backgrounds, but they attended the best schools and formed enduring networks with fellow students.

Some were economists, others specialists in public policy and administration, still others scientists whose contributions to the war effort translated into peacetime prestige. Many were lawyers able to train their honed analytical powers on governance. They were, in a term coined in the late 1950s, the “meritocracy.”

Noah Berlatsky:

Academic writing is bad, and academics should feel bad for writing it. So said Steven Pinker in The Chronicle a couple of years back, but he’s hardly alone. Academics have been kicking — or, if you prefer, virtually dialectically deconstructing — academic writing for more than a decade.

Many “academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity,” Stephen Walt declared in 2013. “Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in,” Rachel Toor argued in 2010. “Obscurity creates an aura of importance,” said Martha Nussbaum as part of a lengthy takedown of the feminist theorist Judith Butler in 1999. You can go back further to find people making the same case if you’re so inclined.

Wisconsin Legislature:

The Study Committee is directed to review all student data gathered by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and the data security measures that protect student privacy. The committee will study whether the data is required by federal law, state statute, or administrative rule and the purposes for which the data is utilized, and consider developing legislation to limit the types of student data collected by DPI and to improve the security of that data.

Two documents from the August session: Data Quality Campaign (PDF).

Electronic Privacy Information Center – EPIC (PDF).

Leif Reigstad:

The video was posted on Facebook as a trailer for Vaxxed, a documentary film directed by disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, the author of a since-retracted study that linked vaccines with autism. The film, which doubled down on his research, drew so much criticism from actual doctors that it was pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival this spring. The trailer preceded a longer eleven-minute promotional video released on Tuesday featuring LaHood and his wife, who claim vaccinations are responsible for health problems that their two children have developed.

On Wednesday, LaHood continued his anti-vaccination campaign, posting a long rant on Facebook encouraging parents to “educate yourselves for the sake of your precious children,” and to “stay away from rhetoric and look at hard facts.” As of Thursday morning, the post had garnered nearly 1,500 comments. LaHood’s responses to some of the more critical commenters are politely defensive, though he does call one commenter a “fool with your head in the sand” and “the typical zealot without an open mind.”

Kate McGee

According to district data, students in schools with majority low-income students are more likely to fail Advanced Placement tests than students in schools with higher-income students. In low-income schools, students are often not taking Advanced Placement tests at all, instead, focusing on other ways to receive college credit in high school, like dual credit.

Lou Kuhn teaches Advanced Placement calculus and dual enrollment* pre-calculus at Crockett High School, where she’s been a teacher for 11 years. She’s known around campus for her dance videos that she makes with her students.

Kuhn is an experienced teacher who has received multiple AP course trainings by the College Board, but she’s very open about something other teachers may be less likely to admit.

Holman Jenkins, JR:

Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves.

This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.

Ralph Haurwitz:

A comprehensive safety review after the slaying of a student at the University of Texas recommends that UT hire more police officers and security guards, improve lighting and tighten controls on nighttime access to campus buildings, among other improvements, officials said Wednesday.

The report by the Texas Department of Public Safety also calls for removing excessive vegetation in some areas, upgrading video surveillance systems and developing policies aimed at reducing the presence of homeless people on campus.

UT President Gregory L. Fenves echoed his previous pledge, when he had asked for the review, to implement all of the recommendations.

Mark Oppenheimer

Twenty years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, the graduate students embarked on a two-week “grade strike,” during which they refused to hand in the fall grades of the undergraduates they were teaching. Grades were due on January 2, 1996, but the grad students, then as now agitating for union recognition, withheld the grades until two weeks later, when it became clear that they were losing the battle on all fronts. The dean of the graduate school brought three union leaders up on disciplinary charges (one was dismissed, though the other two had their punishments overturned); some faculty members threatened graduate students with reprisals, like poor letters of recommendation; and the Yale undergraduates, for whom a transcript without grades was like a scull without oarsmen, turned viciously on their teaching assistants.

Eric Boehm

After detailing how the CEOs of charter schools in Florida and Pennsylvania had recently been convicted of embezzling school funds to enrich themselves, Oliver stressed that the two incidents were not outliers.

“In Philadelphia alone, at least 10 executives or top administrators had pled guilty in the last decade to charges like fraud, misuse of funds or obstruction of justice,” he said.

Robert Pondisco

Response to this series of stunning attacks and political reversals has been muted. The usual groups have told journalists where and how they disagree with the antis. But there’s been no outcry of support for the agenda items under attack, and certainly not from any political leaders, prominent columnists, etc.

This week, by marked contrast, the atmosphere inside the edu-bubble was set alight by—wait for it—John Oliver. The British comedian recorded a “takedown” of charter schools that was quickly and correctly dismissed by Reason‘s Nick Gillespie as “clever, glib, and uninformed.” From the reactions of education reformers, however, you’d think Oliver was Edward R. Murrow and that the expose had appeared on 60 Minutes, not a late-night comedy show.

Louis Kauffman

This essay explores the Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce. We concentrate on his notational approaches to basic logic and his general ideas about Sign, Symbol and diagrammatic thought.

In the course of this paper we discuss two notations of Peirce, one of Nicod and one of Spencer-Brown. Needless to say, a notation connotes an entire language and these contexts are elaborated herein. The first Peirce notation is the portmanteau (see below) Sign of illation. The second Peirce notation is the form of implication in the existential graphs (see below). The Nicod notation is a portmanteau of the Sheffer stroke and an (overbar) negation sign. The Spencer-Brown notation is in line with the Peirce Sign of illation. It remained for Spencer-Brown (some fifty years after Peirce and Nicod) to see the relevance of an arithmetic of forms underlying his notation and thus putting the final touch on a development that, from a broad perspective, looks like the world mind doing its best to remember the significant patterns that join logic, speech and mathematics. The movement downward to the Form (“we take the form of distinction for the form.”[9, Chapter 1, page 1]) through the joining together of words into archetypal portmanteau Signs can be

The Renaissance Mathematicus:

Scientific American has a guest blog post with the title: Mathematicians Are Overselling the Idea That “Math Is Everywhere, which argues in its subtitle: The mathematics that is most important to society is the province of the exceptional few—and that’s always been true. Now I’m not really interested in the substantial argument of the article but the author, Michael J. Barany, opens his piece with some historical comments that I find to be substantially wrong; a situation made worse by the fact that the author is a historian of mathematics.

Barany’s third paragraph starts as follows:

In the first agricultural societies in the cradle of civilization, math connected the heavens and the earth. Priests used astronomical calculations to mark the seasons and interpret divine will, and their special command of mathematics gave them power and privilege in their societies.

David Edwards:

The math myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It returned in the late 80’s when the Germans and Japanese were going to surpass us because they were better in math and science. It’s occurring again now because the Indians and Chinese are better than us in math and science.

I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

Vivek Wadhwa has described how there’s no shortage of scientists and engineers. I’ve been concerned with what skills those who are working as scientists and engineers actually use. I find that the vast majority of scientists, engineers and actuaries only use Excel and eighth grade level mathematics. This suggests that most jobs that currently require advanced technical degrees are using that requirement simply as a filter. In particular, I’m working on documenting the following:

Math Myth Conjecture: If one restricts one’s attention to the hardest cases, namely, graduates of top engineering schools such as MIT, RPI, Cal. Tech., Georgia Tech., etc., then the percent of such individuals holding engineering as opposed to management, financial or other positions, and using more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (arithmetic, a little bit of algebra, a little bit of statistics, and a little bit of programming) is less than 25% and possibly less than 10%.

Maggie Angst

The educational opportunities for students include:

A Black Cultural Center in the Red Gym.
Inclusivity and diversity training for teaching assistants.
A new ethnic studies course to be launched next year.
Three new mental health staff members in the University of Health Services.
Additional training for housing fellows.
Instructional materials for faculty and staff to address diversity.
Although the report outlines a number of programs and initiatives to encourage diversity understanding and conversations this fall, the report does not specifically outline benchmarks to determine whether the programs are successful.

Dean of Students Lori Berquam said measures of success vary depending on the program but did not give a specific example of a program’s success benchmarks.

“For example, with Our Wisconsin we plan to do a formal evaluation because we want to make sure it’s accomplishing what we think it ought to,” Berquam said.

Chad Wellmon:

Since at least the nineteenth century, research universities from Berlin to Baltimore have been indispensable institutions. They have conserved, created, and circulated knowledge not just for the specialized scholars within their ivied and bricked walls but also for the communities outside them. Research universities authorized and legitimated knowledge. They helped separate fact from fallacy. The research university, as Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins, put it in 1885, was a civilizing force. Alongside the family, commerce, and religion, it moved civilization forward. It was the motor of modernity.

But all that, as the sages of Silicon Valley tell us, is being disrupted. The research university, they say, has ossified into a bureaucratic behemoth that no longer creates knowledge—or innovates as the disrupters would put it—so much as inefficiently processes and distributes it. For the prophets of entrepreneurship, innovation, and start-up-ism, the research university is a vestige of a predigital age. Like journalism, manufacturing, and music before it, the research university too will soon be destroyed and reinvented in the digital revolution.

The research university emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany, when Prussian intellectuals and government leaders worried that the very idea of a university, whose origins stretched back at least six centuries to Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, was on the verge of collapse. In 1795, the Wednesday Society, a secret salon of Prussian civil ministers and intellectuals, entertained a provocative proposition from one of its members, a Reformed pastor named J.G. Gebhard. Universities, he asserted, should be abolished. “In our age,” he wrote in an essay circulated among the group before one of their Wednesdayevening meetings, had become “dispensable.” Their “purpose” could be achieved by other means, by which he meant other media, namely, print. As printed encyclopedias, lexica, periodicals, and monographs became more affordable and readily available, the university was losing what many saw as its monopoly on knowledge.

Gebhard’s frank proposal prompted a lively debate among his Wednesday Society colleagues about the purpose of the university in an age of print. They quickly moved beyond his vague imperative—abolish universities— to a more nuanced discussion of the ends of universities. What was the purpose of a university? And, perhaps more importantly, what kind of technologies and institutions were needed around 1800 in order to create and share knowledge that people could trust? Could the medieval model of the university survive the political, technological, religious, and economic revolutions of modernity? Gebhard and his colleagues’ concerns about the future of the university, however, revealed deeper anxieties about the fate of knowledge in an age of the proliferation of print. What counted as real, authoritative knowledge?

Adam Clark:

TRENTON — The results of controversial standardized tests that many New Jersey students have yet to pass will carry three times as much weight in some teacher’s evaluations this school year, the state announced Wednesday.

Teachers in grades 4-7 whose students participate in the PARCC math tests or in grades 4-8 whose students take PARCC English exams will have 30 percent of their rating based on students’ performance on the tests, an increase from 10 percent, Deputy Education Commissioner Peter Shulman said in a memo to schools.

The teacher evaluations take into account how much a teacher’s students improved their scores on the annual PARCC exams. So, a teacher whose students earn low test scores can still get a boost in his or her performance rating as long as the students made progress compared to their peers, according to the state.

“As New Jersey now enters into its third year of PARCC testing, schools have successfully transition to the new exams,” Shulman wrote in the memo. “The PARCC assessment can be used as a tool to improve classroom instruction more effectively than any previous statewide assessment.”

Jason Richwine

When the Head Start Impact Study generally failed to show cognitive or behavioral improvements that lasted beyond kindergarten, Head Start’s defenders pointed to possible “sleeper effects” as a reason to keep the program going. The argument is that Head Start may have imparted a benefit that is not detectable in the elementary years but that emerges later on. A new paper from Brookings’ “Hamilton Project” follows in that tradition, claiming that Head Start improves high school graduation rates, college attendance, self-control, self-esteem, and parenting practices.

Conor Williams & Catherine Brown:

School integration has been a critical priority for many waves of education reformers: students in diverse, integrated schools grow up better prepared to flourish in a plural democratic society and economy.

Yet efforts to convert this promise into practice have repeatedly crashed and broken against various intractable interests: familial anxieties, real estate patterns, and scarcely concealed racism or bigotry. Anxious, privileged, predominantly white families have too frequently responded to integration efforts by leaving diverse neighborhoods or cities for wealthier communities beyond the borders of local desegregation efforts.

Miriam Kingsburg:

Part II of the collection is largely concerned with the 18th- and 19th-century rise of commercial cartography. Fed by growing literacy, travel, and urbanism, a market arose for maps of all kinds, including tourist guides, bird’s-eye views, and spatial depictions of current events. A few authors even note the appearance of faux antique maps, illustrating the popular demand for the application of modern technology to the land and cityscapes of epochs past. Ronald P. Toby shows how cartographers inscribed maps of Edo (present-day Tokyo), then as now the world’s largest city, with information about status distinctions, the “most salient reality” of early modern life in Japan. Mary Elizabeth Berry interrogates the Japanese address system. Why, she asks, have urban residents traditionally identified their location by neighborhood (chô) rather than by street (as in Chinese and Western practice)? Although this was (and is) confusing to outsiders, Berry argues that it serves a more important purpose than navigation: it expresses the irreplaceable function and strong consciousness of local community to residents. Even today, the system remains vital: when displaced from their homes by the “triple disaster” of March 11, 2011, refugees organized camp spaces by chô.

Shannon Reed:

Good Will Hunting

MIT Professor Gerald Lambeau is impressed by the intellect of Will Hunting, a janitor who solved an extremely difficult math problem, but Will needs help processing his complex emotions and anger. Lambeau turns to his estranged former college roommate, Dr. Sean Maguire, for help. Sadly, Maguire, an adjunct professor who must shuttle between three campuses in two states and teach 7 classes a semester to stay off the dole, can’t find a minute to call Lambeau back. Will ends up in jail by the age of 23, Lambeau never goes out on a limb for another student, and Maguire is fired for being late to class because of a car pile-up on I-90.

Run Time: 1 hour

Emerson collective:

In 2012, President Obama offered a bright spot with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. While limited in scope, the program grants temporary deportation relief and work permits to select immigrants brought as children to the United States—for some, the only country they’ve ever really known. Finally, these hardworking young people had the opportunity to flourish.

Recognizing the deep impact that immigration issues have on children, Teach for America became one of many organizations to stand up and invite DACA recipients to work as corps members. Today, young people with DACA status are teaching in communities across the country.

Patricia Murphy

Even in the middle of the school day, you won’t find Rebecca and Tim Owen’s children in a classroom.

Instead, on a recent afternoon, six of the seven Owen kids were at Sunnyside Beach in Washington State. 4-year-old Zoe and 6-year-old year Joshua were looking for feathers to make a dreamcatcher, while the others read or explored the beach. The Owens are being homeschooled, and the trip was part of their curriculum.

After Tim joined the Army in 2005, Rebecca Owen says it made sense to homeschool their children because the family moved around so much.

Fix the Debt:

Growing national debt can drive up interest rates throughout the economy, leading to higher interest payments on mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit card debt.

Although rates are currently low – due mainly to the weak economy and temporary efforts by the Federal Reserve to keep them down – they will most certainly rise as the economy recovers, and they will rise much higher if debt continues to grow.

Reducing the debt will help lower costs for middle-class families. Growing debt levels, on the other hand, will increase interest costs, squeeze family budgets, and put important family investments out of reach. In 25 years, interest rates would be 1 point higher because of debt.[2] Put another way, a family with a $300,000 mortgage can expect to pay at least $60,000 more over the course of the mortgage.

Less Room for Investment in Infrastructure, Research, and the Next Generation

Growing national debt means that the government must pay higher interest payments to service that debt. Interest will represent the fastest growing part of the federal budget. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects interest costs will more than triple from about $250 billion in 2016 to about $850 billion in ten years. By 2027, 100 percent of the revenue we collect will go toward interest payments and mandatory spending. That leaves little room for important priorities and investments such as national defense, education, infrastructure, low-income support, and basic research. As more of our budget goes to financing today’s spending and yesterday’s promises, spending targeted toward the next generation will continue to dwindle.

Dan Butin:

have been mulling over David Theo Goldberg’s recent essay: “Coming Soon To You: Uber U.” It is a story of decline, of the university in ruins, of a powerful vision of the liberal arts impaled on the stake of profits. “The immediate future for academe,” Goldberg writes in his penultimate paragraph, “is one of the growing robotification of basic skills and service delivery and smart algorithms autogenerating their own code. The pressures to downsize the human interface of learning, to limit faculty determination of what and how things are valuable to be learned, and to discount critical knowledge and thinking capacity in every sense of the term will only intensify.”

I am very sympathetic to such a perspective. Higher education is one of the only chances and places where students are helped to understand and confront how to be thoughtful and engaged citizens in a complex and contested pluralistic democracy. Helping students to develop such productive habits of mind and repertoires of action – what the developmental psychologist Marcia Baxter Magolda has eloquently called “self-authorship” – is a fraught undertaking and one that we in higher education take extremely seriously even as we struggle to understand how to do it well.

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Rachel Barr, a professor of psychology at Georgetown, says the notion that young children need parents around in order to gain any real emotional or cognitive benefits from technology has been borne out by other studies as well.

In her own work with infants and toddlers, she has found that a parent’s presence can more than double the chances that a child figures out a task on a touch screen and a parent who is “warm and responsive and sensitive and uses clear language” can increase the likelihood of success even more.

Rosie Cima:

Grattan Elementary school is one of the crown jewels of the San Francisco public school district.

It has a lot going for it: a high ratio of teachers to students, an organic garden, enrichment programs that include choir, dance, technology, and “integrated drama,” high standardized test scores, and—despite being a public school—an enormous budget, courtesy of aggressive fundraising by its Parent-Teacher Association.

The school’s elite status is reflected in its admissions statistics. In San Francisco’s school assignment system, parents of students entering the public school system rank their school preferences, and are matched with schools in a system designed to promote equal opportunity. Every year, lots and lots of parents rank Grattan. In the 2015 school year, Grattan had 1,342 applicants for only 65 spots. The resulting admissions rate of 5% was lower than Harvard’s.

But back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Grattan was struggling. The school’s scores were lackluster, its enrollment was dangerously low, and it was unpopular, especially among affluent white families.

Donna de la Cruz:

In her book, Ms. Schwartz writes about mistakes that might have been prevented if she had known her students better. She had a student named Chris who was obsessed with science. Ms. Schwartz thought she had done Chris a huge favor by securing a spot for him in a science-focused summer camp. But she was unaware of the family’s financial struggles and it turned out that his parents could not afford to take time off from work to get Chris to camp.

I am familiar with some private schools that require teachers visit students’ homes.

Larry Cuban

There is a strongly-held myth many academics, policymakers, and reformers repeat weekly: schools hardly ever change. Those who believe in this myth often cite the large literature demonstrating failed innova­tions in schools or point at calcified bureaucracies and stubborn teachers and principals who block reform after reform (see here and here). Like all myths, this one has a factual basis. There have been many failures to transform schooling in the U.S. From open-space schools to vouchers, there have indeed been vain attempts to alter the course of schooling.

Such a myth is useful for those who beat the drums that U.S. schools are broken. After all, they seek changes that meet their view of what constitutes a “good” education. “Troubled” schools is the basis for the profound pessimism that presently exists over the capacity of public schools to improve. So it is a politically useful myth, but it is inherently mistaken nonetheless.

:Robert Kelchen:

As a shareholder of the Green Bay Packers, I keep an eye on what Butte Community College’s most famous student-athlete has to say. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers famously told fans in “Packer-land” in 2014 to “R-E-L-A-X” after the team got off to an uncharacteristically slow 1-2 start. Fans relaxed after the team went 11-2 the rest of the way in the regular season as Rodgers played like his regular self.

In the education policy niche of the world, few things get people more upset than declining standardized test scores. Last year, I wrote about the fuss about SAT scores declining—and how at least part of that decline is due to more students taking the test instead of the American education system failing young adults. Now it’s ACT’s turn to release their newest scores—and my message again is R-E-L-A-X.

Between 2015 and 2016, average ACT scores declined from 21.0 to 20.8 nationwide, the lowest score in at least five years. But as the now-dominant test in the United States (much to the surprise of many folks who grew up on a coast where the SAT is still common), the percentage of students taking the ACT rose from 52% in 2012 to 59% in 2015 and 64% this year. This sharp increase in ACT takers is in large part due to more states requiring all students to take the ACT as a graduation requirement. In 2016, all graduating high school seniors took the ACT in 18 states, up from 13 states in 2015.

Razib Khan:

There is one section of her talk where Dreger waxes eloquently about the Enlightenment, and freedom of thought, which caught my attention. We have always missed the mark, but at there was a point where in Western intellectual culture the idea that freedom of thought and striving toward truth was at least the paramount method and goal. I am not so sure that is the case today.

When Dreger pointed approvingly on Twitter to University of Chicago’s statement on “safe spaces,” I told her that most of my liberal Twitter follows were enthusiastically sharing this piece, UChicago’s anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power. The piece makes some coherent points, but mostly it is self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation. At a certain point the cultural Left no longer made any pretense to being liberal, and transformed themselves into “progressives.” They have taken Marcuse’s thesis in Repressive Tolerance to heart.

Though I hope that Dreger and her fellow travelers succeed in rolling back the clock, I suspect that the battle here is lost. She points out, correctly, that the total politicization of academia will destroy its existence as a producer of truth in any independent and objective manner. More concretely, she suggests it is likely that conservatives will simply start to defund and direct higher education even more stridently than they do now, because they will correctly see higher education as purely a tool toward the politics of their antagonists. I happen to be a conservative, and one who is pessimistic about the persistence of a public liberal space for ideas that offend. If progressives give up on liberalism of ideas, and it seems that many are (the most famous defenders of the old ideals are people from earlier generations, such as Nadine Strossen and Wendy Kaminer, with Dreger being a young example), I can’t see those of us in the broadly libertarian wing of conservatism making the last stand alone.

Paul Finland

They point out that most coverage they analyzed was episodic, about a new report or the latest crime. Instead, they suggest “news media commit to reflexively exploring their community over the long haul, rather than reactively reporting on events as they arise. … This would mean a change in priorities, perhaps ditching the meeting in favor of a community dinner.”

Their conclusion was edgy: “Through their embrace of value-neutral and facts-only reporting, many Madison news outlets failed to build trust, diversify their sourcing, and tell the true stories of race.”

They wrote that reporters “have been schooled that they cannot have ‘skin in the game’ on any issue. They should not sign petitions, put bumper stickers on their cars, or plant a political sign in their yards.” Yet those reporters’ own life experiences vary around race, class, education, upbringing and social circles. “In covering race, their skin, quite literally, is in the game,” the authors argued.

This raises the question of the importance of employing a diverse staff, something the Cap Times and others struggle with. Our only full-time African-American journalist resigned recently to pursue her dream of law school in Washington, D.C. We are happy for her and sorry she left. She made a big contribution.

Much more on the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.

Madison continues to spend more than most on a non diverse largely one size fits all K-12 structure.

Stanford HCI

With the ubiquity of mobile devices like smartphones, two new widely used methods have emerged: miniature touch screen keyboards and speech-based dictation. It is currently unknown how these two modern methods compare. We therefore evaluated the text entry performance of both methods in English and in Mandarin Chinese on a mobile smartphone. In the speech input case, our speech recognition system gave an initial transcription, and then recognition errors could be corrected using either speech again or the smartphone keyboard.
 
 We found that with speech recognition, the English input rate was 3.0x faster, and the Mandarin Chinese input rate 2.8x faster, than a state-of-the-art miniature smartphone keyboard. Further, with speech, the English error rate was 20.4% lower, and Mandarin error rate 63.4% lower, than the keyboard. Our experiment was carried out using Baidu’s Deep Speech 2, a deep learning-based speech recognition system, and the built-in Qwerty or Pinyin (Mandarin) Apple iOS keyboards. These results show that a significant shift from typing to speech might be imminent and impactful. Further research to develop effective speech interfaces is warranted.

Fan Fei

Public colleges play a special role in making higher education affordable, but in recent years, soaring tuition is pushing that dream out of reach. From 2000 to 2014, the average cost of in-state tuition and fees for public colleges in America rose 80 percent. During that same time period, the median American household income dropped by 7 percent.

Rachel Slade

In November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether the Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) can raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed, or increase enrollment in existing charters in underperforming districts. If the referendum is approved, the city of Boston—which currently has 27 Commonwealth charter schools that operate independently of the district and educate about 14 percent of the student population—will likely see an increase in charters over the next several years. It’s an advance that charter advocates firmly champion but opponents see as another little push in the direction of a very steep cliff.

How did public education get so contentious, even as Boston’s public school system is near the top on every available scoring index of the nation’s major urban districts? Why does Brooke Charter Schools founder Jon Clark, a quiet, straight-talking guy from Wellesley, become slightly unhinged when I share some of the views of the anti-charter folks? What is it about this debate that brings out the tinfoil-hatted paranoia in all of us?

Ideologically speaking, charter schools—which are publicly funded but operate outside of typical district and teachers union rules—are the muddiest of all political issues, simultaneously supported by neoliberals and ultraconservatives, progressives and regressives, hedge funders and immigrants. For those who favor them, charters represent our best hope for improving education. In fact, the pro-charter movement is predicated on the certainty that public education is in crisis, and it lays the blame squarely on government incompetence and union hegemony. Well-run charters, they argue, not only educate children more cheaply, but also more effectively. The data back that up: The average SAT composite score in Boston’s charter high schools in 2015 was 100 points higher (about 10 percentile points) than the district schools’.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Alex Zimmerman:

Americans are overwhelmingly against closing struggling schools, divided on whether parents should be allowed to opt their kids out of standardized tests, and more enthusiastic about expanding career and technical education than honors classes.

They’re also split on what, exactly, schools are for in the first place.
Those are just some of the findings from an annual poll published Monday by PDK International, a professional association of educators. And while the study is based on a representative sample drawn from across all 50 states, Josh Starr, a former New York City teacher who is now CEO of PDK, said the findings map onto local debates about the city’s “Renewal” turnaround program, for instance, and state policy on career and technical education.
Here are four charts from the report that connect with conversations that are unfolding in New York City.

Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel Education

The University of Virginia has spent the past decade building an investment fund that now totals $2.2 billion, a pile of money so large that officials say it could finance the entire school and medical center for nine months.

As the balance grew, the university sought to protect the annual funding it gets from Virginia taxpayers and raised its tuition significantly, with the price for in-state freshmen rising 30 percent since 2013.

On Friday, lawmakers in Richmond plan to ask the school to justify stockpiling so much money, outside of its endowment, to generate discretionary revenue for selected projects. Their questions come as the state confronts a possible shortfall of about $1.5 billion in its current two-year budget.

Ernie Smith

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

When I recently wrote about airport stores, one of the most interesting (albeit minor) facets of the piece was the fact that airport travelers are generally considered a captive audience, making it easy for shops to jack up prices.

Airports, though, are amateur hour compared to the college textbook industry.

Any industry that can increase its prices by 1,041 percent over a 38-year period—as the textbook industry did between 1977 and 2015, according to an NBC News analysis—is one that knows how to keep, and hold, an audience. (It’s almost like they’re selling EpiPens.)

Frederick Logevall & Kenneth Osgood

This matters. Knowledge of our political past is important because it can serve as an antidote to the misuse of history by our leaders and save us from being bamboozled by analogies, by the easy “lessons of the past.” It can make us less egocentric by showing us how other politicians and governments in other times have responded to division and challenge. And it can help us better understand the likely effects of our actions, a vital step in the acquisition of insight and maturity.

Judging by the state of our political discourse during this dismal campaign season, the change can’t come soon enough.

Paul Glasteris

• While 19 out of U.S. News’ top 20 national university rankings are private schools, the majority of Washington Monthly’s top 20 are public institutions, including University of California-San Diego, Texas A&M, and Utah State University, schools that rate nowhere near the top at U.S. News.

• While a few elite schools, such as Stanford and Harvard top the Washington Monthly list, others underperform. Columbia, Northwestern, and Washington University in St. Louis, which rank 4th, 12th, and 15th respectively, on the U.S. News list, come in 24th, 40th, and 99th in the Washington Monthly rankings.

• Berea College, ranked 67th on U.S. News’ list of liberal arts colleges, comes in 1st in the Washington Monthly.

While nearly half of all college students today are adults, no national publication has ever ranked colleges based on which serve adult students best—until now. To put together its exclusive ranking of the best four-year and two-year colleges for adult learners, the Washington Monthly compiled reams of data on which schools best meet these students’ unique needs, such as plenty of weekend, evening, and online classes to fit busy work schedules.

The top five four-year colleges for adults are:
• Golden Gate University—San Francisco (CA)
• University of Utah (UT)
• Park University (MO)
• Concordia University—St. Paul (MN)
• University of Colorado-Denver (CO)

Kashmir Hill

Facebook’s ability to figure out the “people we might know” is sometimes eerie. Many a Facebook user has been creeped out when a one-time Tinder date or an ex-boss from 10 years ago suddenly pops up as a friend recommendation. How does the big blue giant know?

While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why.

“I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone.

The next week, things got weirder.

Most of her patients are senior citizens or people with serious health or developmental issues, but she has one outlier: a 30-something snowboarder. Usually, Facebook would recommend he friend people his own age, who snowboard and jump out of planes. But Lisa told me that he had started seeing older and infirm people, such as a 70-year-old gentleman with a walker and someone with cerebral palsy.

Rana Foroohar

When there is wrongdoing in fields that are both complex and opaque, it often takes a whistle-blower to inform the public. That’s exactly what former quant trader turned social activist Cathy O’Neil has become for the world of Big Data. A Harvard trained mathematician, O’Neil spent the last several years teaching at Barnard, working for DE Shaw, one of the world’s leading hedge funds, and launching a technology start up designed to deliver targeted advertising. Her key takeaway from the last two experiences—that Big Data is increasing inequality and threatening democracy—is the subject of her important new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, out on September 6.

Unlike the WMDs that were never found in Iraq, data driven algorithms are all around us. Already, many of our bosses use them to grade our performance. Our children’s teachers are hired and fired by them. They decide who gets access to credit and who pays higher insurance premiums, as well as who will receive online advertising for luxury handbags versus who’ll be targeted by predatory ads for for-profit universities.

In fact, it was that last example that prompted O’Neil, who’s also a member of the Occupy Movement, to write her book. While working at the start-up, she heard a presentation from an investor lauding the fact that the company’s new technology would mean that he would “never have to see another ad for the University of Phoenix,” but would be automatically funneled more offers for “vacations in Aruba and jet skis.” “I realized that far from doing anything good, this technology was actually siloing people into online gated communities where they no longer had to even acknowledge the existence of the poor,” she says.

O’Neil sees plenty of parallels between the usage of Big Data today and the predatory lending practices of the subprime crisis. In both cases, the effects are hard to track, even for insiders. Like the dark financial arts employed in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Big Data algorithms that sort us into piles of “worthy” and “unworthy” are mostly opaque and unregulated, not to mention generated (and used) by large multinational firms with huge lobbying power to keep it that way. “The discriminatory and even predatory way in which algorithms are being used in everything from our school system to the criminal justice system is really a silent financial crisis,” says O’Neil.

The effects are just as pernicious. Using her deep technical understanding of modeling, she shows how the algorithms used to, say, rank teacher performance are based on exactly the sort of shallow and volatile type of data sets that informed those faulty mortgage models in the run up to 2008. Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways—a young black man, for example, who lives in an area targeted by crime fighting algorithms that add more police to his neighborhood because of higher violent crime rates will necessarily be more likely to be targeted for any petty violation, which adds to a digital profile that could subsequently limit his credit, his job prospects, and so on. Yet neighborhoods more likely to commit white collar crime aren’t targeted in this way.

In higher education, the use of algorithmic models that rank colleges has led to an educational arms race where schools offer more and more merit rather than need based aid to students who’ll make their numbers (thus rankings) look better. At the same time, for-profit universities can troll for data on economically or socially vulnerable would be students and find their “pain points,” as a recruiting manual for one for-profit university, Vatterott, describes it, in any number of online questionnaires or surveys they may have unwittingly filled out. The schools can then use this info to funnel ads to welfare mothers, recently divorced and out of work people, those who’ve been incarcerated or even those who’ve suffered injury or a death in the family.

Indeed, O’Neil writes that WMDs punish the poor especially, since “they are engineered to evaluate large numbers of people. They specialize in bulk. They are cheap. That’s part of their appeal.” Whereas the poor engage more with faceless educators and employers, “the wealthy, by contrast, often benefit from personal input. A white-shoe law firm or an exclusive prep school will lean far more on recommendations and face-to-face interviews than a fast-food chain or a cash-strapped urban school district. The privileged… are processed more by people, the masses by machines.”

Kathy Boccella:

A Montgomery County judge has ordered the Lower Merion School District to revoke its latest tax hike, saying the district misled taxpayers by projecting large budget deficits to justify raising taxes 4.4 percent when it actually had socked away millions of surplus dollars.

In what may be an unprecedented win for Pennsylvania taxpayers, Common Pleas Judge Joseph A. Smyth said in his decision Monday that the district could increase taxes for 2016-17, but no more than 2.4 percent.

The judge said he would “leave for another day” the question of rebates, refunds, and credits for those who already paid their current school tax bills. He said he would consider establishing a trust to collect “improperly” accumulated past taxes – an estimated $1,400 per household – if it is determined that all Lower Merion taxpayers are plaintiffs.

Robert Reich starts a Twitter thread. Might avoiding the collective and work rule approach change things?

Edward Schlosser:

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

What it was like before
In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street’s recklessness had destroyed the economy.

Doug Erickson

Tommy Badger Aug 30, 2016 8:51am

Our school board is living in the past. The state is not going to raise financial support for public schools. Our school board was given tools to make changes to operate in the new Republican reality. They refuse to use these new tools and continue to expect the taxpayers to cover them.

How many charter schools do we have? How many students do we have to lose to Oregon and Verona due to the overcrowded Leopold campus?

This school board doesn’t deserve our support until they make some changes in how they operate.
Middle Man Aug 30, 2016 8:34am

Act 10 works for the vast majority of school boards, puts them in check. Unfortunately for us here in tax town, this school board doesn’t know how to balance a check book, so they blame SW and understand the tax base is socialist Bernie supports…heck you could raise taxes to 75 percent and still blame Walker and get away with it.
KickiceWis Aug 30, 2016 8:58am

“heck you could raise taxes to 75 percent and still blame Walker and get away with it.”

There is plenty to blame Walker for. A 75% tax rate isn’t necessary.

And keep one tiny little tidbit in mind when you laud Act 10 and how school districts raise taxes. Districts raise taxes on average every 10 years. In 2010, with the fear of Act 10 being implemented, 80 of the states school districts raised tax levies. So just because few have since, don’t assume Act 10 was the reason. Time will tell.
Middle Man Aug 30, 2016 9:21am

On average every 10 years, so tell me how MMSD rates on the law of averages. Not lauding Act 10, don’t assume its SW fault either.
array1 Aug 30, 2016 11:54am

So other Wi school districts have not increased taxes to make up for the walker cuts?
KickiceWis Aug 30, 2016 8:32am

Nobody wants to pay more in taxes. And like others, I agree there is some funding that can come from other wasteful spending.

But people freak out when taxes go up to support schools. Schools. Can we find any better way to spend tax dollars than educating our children? The average tax increase on school spending is $60 a year on an average $250,000 home. That is $5 a month. Seriously people, is $5 a month going to break you? This is a whole lot of whining for $5 a month.
joe Aug 30, 2016 9:04am

I think the concern is more about whether the school is using the money wisely, not whether schools are important.

Much more on the Madison School District’s nearly $18k/student budget, here.

Jonathan Rees

Even if Daphne Koller and company are not yet willing to admit this fact publicly, with all that MOOC hype fading quickly into the rear-view mirror their actions speak louder than their previous once ever-so-optimistic words. MOOCs and other forms of automated online education may persist as long as there’s a surplus of money in Silicon Valley anxious to disrupt higher education for the sake of capital rather than students. That ship may sail on indefinitely, but compared to the inflated rhetoric that once blew through their sails, MOOCs are destined to remain ghost ships floating on the open ocean, without the lost crew that had such high hopes to transform education forever at the start of their long journeys.

The new, new thing always takes awhile to emerge. Legacy institutions presumably understand the history of innovation along with long term information trends….

Sarah Karp

Over the past weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools announced that results from the NWEA assessment show that 60 percent of students are performing above the national average in reading and 50 percent in math. This is an improvement since last year and the best the district has done since it began using the NWEA in 2013.

One wonders how Madison (about $18k), which spends substantially more than Chicago per student, compares?

Toni Airaksinen:

When I first discovered women’s studies, I was lulled into a comforting sense that I had discovered the “truth.” It was as if my veil of ignorance had been yanked away, and I was blissfully seeing the world for what it really was.

I have taken seven women’s studies classes; initially at a nondescript state university and later at a women’s college in Manhattan. After taking those classes, I realize that not only was I deluded, but I was led into an absurd intellectual alcove where objective truth is subordinate to academic theories used as political propaganda.

Indeed, since knowledge itself is considered a patriarchal construct, feminist theories are the organizing principles of classes.

The theoretical backbone of women’s studies is grounded in three main conjectures: that of the patriarchy, intersectional oppression, and social constructionism.

None of these contentions can be proven or falsified. Yet, as a student, good grades are contingent on agreeing with them. So what do they actually represent?

……

Oppression does indeed exist. But, oppression is complicated, far more complicated than can be distilled in an undergraduate academic setting. And teaching students how to view the world through the lens of oppression isn’t just dangerous, but cruel. Nothing is more oppressive than having your professors teach you that you’re a victim.

The Economist

 THE economies of the rich world increasingly depend upon skilled workers, and college degrees are in high demand. In 1972 a university-educated man aged 25-34 could expect to earn 22% more than a peer without a degree, according to the Urban Institute, a think-tank. Today that premium has risen to 70%. But if university pays, its benefits are not spread evenly across all graduates. A new report from PayScale, a research firm, calculates the returns to higher education in American universities. Its authors compare the career earnings of college graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, after taking account of financial aid.

Megan Thielking

A new survey published in Pediatrics on Monday reports that 87 percent of pediatricians in the United States say they encountered parents refusing to vaccinate their children in 2013. A decade earlier, 75 percent of doctors reported they had experienced vaccine refusals.

The most common reason parents gave, according to doctors? The vaccines weren’t necessary.

Graham Brown-Martin

We operate our schools as teacher-centred, subject knowledge focused systems and continually test around that. Not just the students but we also have teachers spending as much time evidencing their practice within these metrics rather than by the kids whose curiosity and wonder they’ve ignited by great teaching.

No wonder excellent teachers are leaving the profession in droves when they have been reduced to content delivery specialists and rewarded on the basis of grades rather than inspiring young minds. The craft of teaching is rapidly diminishing given all it takes is a 6 week course on top of 2:1 degree to call yourself a teacher. In some cases you don’t even need the 6 week course. Imagine if that’s all it took to become a doctor. There would be riots.

Joe Timmerman

Certain classes at this university require students to use an online program to complete and submit their homework — for instance, Accounting 100, Finance 100 Economics 101 and Physics 202. There are certainly some advantages to online homework, like faster feedback and much less work for professors and teaching assistants. However, at what expense? For many of these programs, there are two ways to gain access: either purchase the textbook new or purchase an access code for the program separately. In some cases, access to the online program can cost more than $100 – as much or more than the new textbook itself.

Considering that online coursework programs are priced in such a ludicrous manner, it becomes clear this is nothing more than an attempt by textbook companies to quash the used textbook market.

But why would professors choose to use these types of programs? After all, professors have been through their fair share of school. They understand how budget-busting purchasing textbooks can be. While I’m not a mind reader, allow me to hazard a few guesses.

Josh Robinson:

The SEDA, or Sustainable Economic Development Assessment ranks more than 160 countries across 10 areas including economic stability, health, governance and environment. It uses two measures, the first a current score taking into the most recent data and a rolling score that assesses how countries can convert economic growth into well-being over an eight year period from 2006 to 2014.

Charles Sahm

By painting all states with a broad brush, Oliver presented a one-sided story. A more nuanced, thoughtful take would note that many states take charter accountability seriously and that those states employing the “serious, slow and steady” approach produce better results.

Nick Hillman.

Aaron Hanson:

THE MOST RECENT National Science Foundation (NSF) “Survey of Earned Doctorates” raises eyebrows, not because it paints a predictably bleak picture for the job prospects of humanities PhD students, but because people are surprised that prospects for engineering and science PhDs aren’t looking so good either.

In a fascinating way, the NSF data challenges a long-standing narrative about job opportunities by field of study. We’re used to thinking of — more accurately, maligning — humanities students as idealistic, unsystematic dreamers prone to “Peter Pan syndrome,” irrationality, and reality avoidance. Humanities PhDs struggling to find sustainable employment don’t garner much societal sympathy, largely because it’s considered axiomatic that a person with a humanities PhD has no business thinking she possesses economic value. But when the scientists and engineers — the ones confirmation bias demands we view as rational and pragmatic — are caught in a rough job market flirting with something that looks like quixotic delusion, we’re forced to rethink our assumptions. Once it appears that it’s not just humanities students making unadvisable career choices, it suddenly becomes more difficult to victim-blame unemployed doctors (of philosophy) as a whole.

Brad Wolverton

Fifteen credits were all he needed. That’s what the school district in California where Adam Sambrano works as a career-guidance specialist required for a bump in pay. But when he saw the syllabus for a graduate course he’d enrolled in last year at Arizona State University, he knew he was in trouble.

Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written. The idea of that much research worried Mr. Sambrano, who also spends time serving in the Army National Guard.

Before the class started, he went on Craigslist and enlisted the service of a professional cheater. For $1,000 — less than the monthly housing allowance he was receiving through the GI Bill, he says — Mr. Sambrano hired a stranger to take his entire course.

Via Steve Crandall.