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• May 18, 2012 04:46 PM No, Stop with the Tech Focus: Go to College and Major in the Humanities

  With all of the focus policymakers currently have on getting more students to study Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, it’s worth pointing out that not everyone on thinks this is a responsible public policy direction.

  According to an article by Vivek Wadhwa in the Washington Post:

  The theory goes as follows: STEM degree holders will get higher pay upon graduation and get a leg up in the career sprint.

  The trouble is that theory is wrong. In 2008, my research team at Duke and Harvard surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies. We found that they tended to be highly educated: 92 percent held bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent held higher degrees. But only 37 percent held degrees in engineering or computer technology, and just two percent held them in mathematics. The rest have degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, finance, healthcare, arts and the humanities.

  As Wadhwa, a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford Law School, explains,

  Gaining a degree made a big difference in the sales and employment of the company that a founder started. But the field that the degree was in was not a significant factor. Over the past two years, I have interviewed the founders of more than 300 Silicon Valley start-ups. The most common traits I have observed are a passion to change the world and the confidence to defy the odds and succeed.

  And those traits, perhaps, are actually fostered by majoring in the liberal arts.

  As Wadhwa says, “humanity majors make the best project managers, the best product managers, and, ultimately, the most visionary technology leaders.” Now, granted, he can’t actually prove this, but he makes a good case. Humanities majors, often, can come up with good ideas because they, perhaps better than the STEM geeks, get how people interact with technology and new ideas.

  by Daniel Luzer tags reform, technology

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• May 18, 2012 04:16 PM Kathleen Sebelius and Georgetown

  The controversy of Georgetown University’s recent decision to invite U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak at its commencement has ended.

  Earlier this year Georgetown invited Sebelius to speak at the graduation ceremonies for the school’s Public Policy Institute.

  Washington’s archbishop, Donald Cardinal Wuerl, said the invitation to Sebelius, a practicing Catholic, was “shocking.” Apparently her role in crafting the mandate requiring health insurance companies to cover birth control without requiring a co-pay by employees was symbolic of some horrible problem. As Wuerl wrote:

  The issue is religious freedom. Secretary Sebelius’ mandate defines religious ministry so narrowly that our Catholic schools and universities, hospitals and social service ministries do not qualify as “religious enough” to be exempt. This redefinition of religion penalizes Catholic organizations because they welcome and serve all people regardless of their faith. Ironically, because of Georgetown’s commitment to open its doors to Catholic and non-Catholic students alike, the university fails to qualify as a religious institution under the HHS mandate.

  But Georgetown didn’t back down, and Sebelius still spoke. According to an article by Jenna Johnson in the Washington Post:

  On Wednesday, more than 90 students signed a letter to DeGioia and the institute’s dean that explained why they wanted to hear from Sebelius. The letter reads, in part: “Many of our students may disagree with some of the speakers who come to Georgetown, but we all feel lucky to attend a university where we hear directly from top leaders in our field of studies.” The same day, more than 20 faculty members signed a letter welcoming Sebelius to the institute.

  She was interrupted briefly by a protestor but carried on with her, pretty apolitical, speech. She told graduates to “always hold on to your commitment to work for the common good. If you let that focus guide you, you will never go off course.”

  The Catholic Church has never shied away from controversy, especially as it applies to commencement speakers. The concern over Sebelius seems misguided, however.

  There’s arguably some legitimate moral ground for opposing the presence of politicians who are stridently supportive of abortion rights, since the Catholic Church opposes this as both as a person choice and as public policy.

  But, frankly, the Catholic Church has no specific policy on whether or not a national government can compel private insurance companies to cover contraceptives.” Arguably the very existence of private insurance companies is the real moral violation here.

  by Daniel Luzer tags Georgetown, health care

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• May 18, 2012 11:00 AM Graduation Speakers Fail

  

  It’s really odd how the James Franco just keeps showing up in higher education discussions (my bet, 25 years from now he’s going to be the president of USC or something; real academics will probably continue to ridicule him) but while the handsome actor’s intellectual dilettantism is often maddeningly lightweight, he’s sometimes really right about some of academia’s bullshit.

  According to the star himself (in a piece he wrote in the Huffington Post):

  Commencement speeches suck. To set the scene: About four years ago, I was asked to give the commencement speech at U.C.L.A. in front of all the members of the graduating class and their families. In all, it’s more than 10,000 people, enough to fill the stands and the floor of Pauley Pavilion. Because I had only just earned my B.A. from U.C.L.A. — I had returned when I was in my late 20s to finish my English degree — some of the students felt that I hadn’t accomplished enough to inspire them. They created a Facebook group, which attracted about 220 members from a class of 6,000 — enough to earn them some local news coverage and an invitation for the creator of the page to speak on NPR. I’m sure it must have seemed odd that someone who had been in their classes the previous year was asked to give the speech, but I couldn’t help noticing that not one of the protesters had bothered to sign up for the selection committee that actually chooses the commencement speaker each year. My guess is that they didn’t really care who gave their commencement speech; they were just taking advantage of the opportunity to blow off some steam. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no one remembers their commencement speaker’s speech.

  He’s right. Part of the trouble is that we haven’t quite figured out what the commencement speech is supposed to be about. While college graduation speeches take place in a serious academic setting, they’re not themselves actually a matter of serious intellectual concern. But it can seem a little inappropriate to crack jokes throughout the whole thing, show up in a clown costume, or tell graduates that finishing college is actually not a big deal. Speakers worry the ghosts of Yale dons of the past will haunt them for their desecration of the institution (or maybe that they just won’t be asked to give another lucrative little speech at some school next year).

  And so they often end up saying nothing. The guest speaker gets paid $30,000 to talk about all the wonderful things life has in store for the graduates, how they should always remember their roots, and how they’ll overcome, with aplomb, all the struggles an early professional career will thrust upon them.

  Snore. I’m amazed more of them just don’t recycle their speeches from stuff they found on the internet. It’s hardly worth trying that hard. The only memorable commencement speeches, in fact, are those that don’t have much do to with college graduation.

  Perhaps the most significant in recent history was that delivered by Secretary of State George Marshall, when he gave the address to the 1945 Harvard graduating class. Dispensing with the usual “follow your dreams” blather, he used the occasion to announce his plan to use American aid to promote recovery and reconstruction in Europe and Japan.

  But not every guest speaker, of course, has a Marshall plan in mind. Sometimes it’s best just to stick to what you know. Franco again:

  I once asked Tina Fey if she ever gave commencement speeches, and she said she only speaks at high schools — there’s too much pressure at the college level. And when UT Arlington invited me to speak, I had a ton of reservations. Mainly, I didn’t want to give a thankless speech to a bunch of ungrateful people who would criticize me and then forget the speech anyway. Commencement speeches are the worst kind of speech, because you need to be enthusiastic and inspiring in your own voice. There is nothing cheesier than that. No wonder Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen gave their Harvard speeches in character. Liberated from the burden of being Tony Robbins, they were free to simply entertain.

  And why not? The kids’ grandparents flew in for this day. At least give everyone a good show. [Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags funny, graduation

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• May 18, 2012 10:01 AM The Salary Obsession

  One new plan to measure college effectiveness would rate colleges in part based on how much their graduates earn. Students would be able to decide on colleges by comparing how much the place costs relative to how much they might earn later. This is an understandable move for colleges to make, but it reflects some really misguided priorities.

  According to an article by Daniel de Vise in the Washington Post:

  Until now, it has been almost impossible for students to include in their deliberations what graduating from specific colleges and their programs is likely to yield in terms of jobs and salaries after graduation. But that is starting to change.

  Information will begin to become available this year that will enable students to say: “If I go to College X and earn a nursing/economics/marketing degree, I’m more likely to get a good-paying job post-graduation than if I receive the same degree from College Y.”

  This comes, or is coming, as a result of a shift in priorities over time in the way America tracks and measures its universities. De Vise:

  The primary source of new information is a new Labor Department-driven, data-sharing partnership among states, called the Wage Records Interchange System. The Labor Department has placed state-level employment and earnings data in a single place and is now getting states to agree to share the data. So, with the push of a button, states can look into each other’s databases.

  Twenty-two states have signed on so far, with more coming on board every month. With access to this information, college administrators in Maryland will be able to see where their students have gone to work and how much they are earning - unless, of course, they inquire about their Virginia-bound graduates or others who have moved to states that have yet to join the agreement. Yes, that means that Virginia - unless it signs on - cannot get good information about most students who graduate and then go to work in Maryland, or D.C., or North Carolina, or any other state.

  A second important source of information about college graduates’ jobs and earnings will be released this year by the Department of Education. So called “Gainful Employment Reports” will reveal employment and earnings levels for students who graduate from the most popular technical certificate programs at colleges all across the country. If these reports show wide disparities among graduates from different colleges, can it be long before the same data are demanded for all bachelors’ degree programs?

  This is vulgar. We go to college to learn. Jobs are secondary. A college education, as much as possible, should help people understand that lots of things are far more important than how much you earn.

  The Gainful Employment Reports make sense because they measure the earnings of people who attend vocational institutions, not colleges. Vocational schools exist only to help people get jobs. But that’s simply not what college is for.

  We get focused on these job earnings measures of college effectiveness for two reasons. In the first place, this is because we don’t really have a good measure of how much students learn in college. The other reason Americans have started to worry about earnings is because the debt of undergraduates is skyrocketing.

  But the debt is the real problem. That’s the thing to address here, not the earnings later. These aren’t vocational schools.

  by Daniel Luzer tags bullsh--it, reform, salaries

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• May 17, 2012 05:33 PM “Ready to Go to Work”

  Apparently the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, has an interesting new plan to help graduates of the City Colleges of Chicago, the city’s long troubled public college system, get jobs: just pay companies to hire them.

  According to an article by Tina Sfondeles in the Chicago Sun-Times:

  Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a $2 million stipend for companies willing to hire City Colleges of Chicago graduates.

  “You hire one of our community college kids, we’ll pay their stipend for the first four weeks of work,” Emanuel said Saturday during his commencement address to 3,300 graduates at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion. “… I want the rest of the country and all the people to know we got great community colleges with great kids who are ready to go to work.”

  Well perhaps, but this fiscal transfer agreement suggests that the degree from one of the City Colleges alone might not really be sufficient to ensuring success in the workplace.

  If you’ve really got all of these “great kids read to go to work” why do you have to pay companies $2 million to hire them?

  by Daniel Luzer tags community college, employment

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• May 17, 2012 05:12 PM The New SAT?

  The new president of the College Board, David Coleman, has announced that one of his top priorities in his new job—as head of the organization that administers the SAT and other standardized tests—will be to try to change the SAT to reflect the Common Core State Standards.

  Common Core, a national education initiative pushed by American governors and corporate leaders, aims to bring all state K-12 school standards into alignment and also be “robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.” Most states, 45 of them, have signed on to Common Core.

  Coleman, a Rhodes scholar and former McKinsey consultant, is an architect of and major advocate for the standards.

  According to an article by Catherine Gewertz in Education Week:

  Mr. Coleman’s hope of reworking the SAT could play a role in moving the standards from a set of guidelines used in college course placement to one considered in college admissions. That, to Mr. Coleman, goes to the heart of the standards’ intention.

  “The common core provides substantial opportunity to make the SAT even more reflective of what higher education wants,” he said in an interview. “The real value here is that if the SAT aligns more to the common core, we won’t be giving an assessment at the end of K-12 that’s out of kilter with what we demand at the end of the day. All that does is encourage last-minute test preparation and sudden adaptation. The instrument should measure the steady practice of the work you’ve been doing.”

  He noted, though, that since the College Board is a membership organization that includes K-12 and higher education, any change in the exam would be done “in partnership” with that membership base and would have to be executed gradually to preserve the validity of test results over time.

  It’s unclear how Coleman believes changing the SAT to reflect Common Core Standards, which would entail focusing more on students’ ability to cite evidence and demonstrate conceptual understanding of their high school subject matter, would actually improve educational quality in the United States.

  The SATs were created in early 20th century to do in many ways the very opposite of what Coleman proposes, notably to measure student capability in a way that wasn’t specifically connected to their socioeconomic background or the quality of their high school education. The SAT was supposed to predict first-year college grades.

  It’s never really been very good at that, since it’s basically just a measure of student intelligence, but the SAT remains the most objective measure colleges have come to use for making admissions decisions.

  by Daniel Luzer tags standardized testing

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• May 17, 2012 03:17 PM Stanford’s Credential Problem

  A couple of weeks ago, while discussing the announcement of the Harvard / MIT edX initiative, I included a brief recap of what’s been happening over the last six months in the land of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which began as follows:

  Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so.

  Later that day, I received an email titled “error in your blog” from a person who works in communications for Stanford, which I’m reprinting with permission. The person said:

  Students who did well did not receive a certificate. Neither Stanford nor the professors issued a certificate. All students who completed the courses received a letter from the professor saying that they had completed the course. And that’s it.

  This is telling. I used the word “certificate” deliberately, because “letter” seemed inadequate. A letter is a vehicle for interpersonal correspondence, e.g. “Dear Mom, I am having fun at camp this summer, please send cookies,” or “Dear Sir, we regret to inform you that your manuscript does not meet our standards for publication.” A certificate is a document describing some kind of important characteristic of the bearer, as attested by the issuer. A college diploma is a kind of certificate, as is a teaching certificate issued by a state licensing board, as were the old-fashioned “letters of introduction” people once used to facilitate business and social interactions. As is, I would argue, the document that students received upon completing the Stanford MOOC in question. Here it is:

  
  

  

  Looks like a certificate to me.

  This shows the biggest weakness in Stanford’s engagement with the rapidly-developing world of highly-branded MOOCs. By rights, Stanford should own this space. Winning the MOOC space will require a combination of investment capital, branded credibility in the marketplace, deep expertise in academics, and deep expertise in the formation and scaling of hugely popular online enterprises. There’s nowhere in the world with more of that stuff in one place than Stanford and the surrounding Silicon Valley environs.

  But unlike Harvard and MIT, Stanford has thus far been unwilling to lend its super-valuable brand name to some kind of certificate of learning. That will make a huge difference over time. People need more than learning; they need evidence of learning. Stanford’s current reflexive “Don’t say certificate!” attitude reflects the deep ambivalence of organizations that look at MOOCs and see both immense opportunities to expand their mission and presence worldwide and huge risks to an exclusivity-driven success model that has served them well for the last century. Harvard and MIT have gotten over it. Stanford should, too.

  [Cross-posted at The Quick & the Ed]

  by Kevin Carey tags technology

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• May 17, 2012 11:00 AM A Different Choice

  The New York Times has a regular blog called The Choice, featuring posts by high school seniors aspiring to college. One part of this involves discussions about admissions and decisions about where to attend college. I’ve never really focused much on this before (because, you know, who cares) but Peter Jacobs over at Ivy Gate noticed something rather interesting about the blog.

  Despite the fact the high school seniors are supposed to represent students from different classes and academic abilities, admissions seems to work out pretty well for some of these students:

  Each year, six to eight aspirant collegians guest blog about their school search in a feature called “The Envelope, Please.” These youngsters come from a range of backgrounds, and are looking at schools all over the map. However, as we at IvyGate recently noticed, men who write for The Choice tend to have a little boost with a certain Cambridge based school.

  

  Harvard College admitted 3.8 percent of all applicants this year. The Harvard acceptance rate for guys who write for The Choice, however, is 80 percent. [Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags Harvard, media

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• May 17, 2012 10:00 AM Moving Back in With Mom and Dad

  A recent campaign ad by American Crossroads Super PAC for Mitt Romney attempted to present President Barack Obama as an unsuccessful using several disturbing statistics. One of them was particularly frightening:

  85 percent of recent college graduates are moving back in with their parents? Whoa.

  That figure, however, is just flat wrong. PolitiFact looked into it and discovered that the source was a now defunct political consulting firm called Twentysomething Inc., which said it got the number from a poll “done for a client many years ago.” The organization’s managing director declined to name the client or explain the survey or methodology.

  In fact, according to a report recently issued by the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of college graduates younger than 29 live with their parents.

  That’s not very good, but it’s not nearly as bad as the Romney advertisement indicated. According to PolitiFact

  The ad cites a questionable survey and suggests the data is new when the author says the survey was “many years ago.” [Furthermore], the ad blames Obama for a phenomenon that economists say is beyond the impact of a president. We rate the claim False.

  Incidentally, this “Obama is so cool” thing is tactic the McCain campaign tried four years ago. McCain-Palin attempted to discredit Barack Obama because he was so popular. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?” the McCain advertisement asked.

  Don’t do this, Romney. President Obama is popular because people like him. Popularity does not rise in inverse proportion to presidential ability. Do not highlight your own unpopularity as a way to make you seem more qualified; it just makes you look more unattractive.

  by Daniel Luzer tags Mitt Romney

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• May 16, 2012 05:09 PM Lone Star Remediation

  The Washington Monthly has published several pieces in the last few years about remediation in American colleges.

  Remedial courses, the non-credit classes college students take that are supposed to prepare them for real college lessons, mostly aren’t effective. Student who take remedial courses are dramatically less likely to complete college.

  But community colleges in Texas have a new plan to try to address this. According to an article by Max Baker at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

  New Mathways Project is a system of new mathematics courses and student support services that will help students earn college-level math credit more quickly. The project is a systemic approach to the problem that will allow students to take math courses that align with their majors and future jobs.

  So basically students will still have to take remedial math, but now instead of all remedial students taking the same no-credit courses, they’ll be taking specific developmental math courses targeted with specific subsequent classes in mind.

  Remedial students who want to major in the sciences or math will still have to take the algebra-based remediation course now offered. But the new system will also offer different remedial courses, designed to prepare students for statistics or quantitative reasoning, which might be a little more appropriate for their interests.

  This is not necessarily the best solution, (which would probably be just putting students in regular math courses and offering them targeted, extra help) but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

  At least community colleges in Texas are starting to think about what students are taking remedial courses for, and what they want to do afterward. Creating a targeted pathway like this has some very important potential for helping to promote improvement.

  According to the Baker article, Texas college students referred to remedial courses are 50 percent less likely to graduate.

  by Daniel Luzer tags community college, remedial education, Texas

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