American Opportunity Myths

Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins have written a piece for Brookings titled "Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity."  None of it's new to those who've paid much attention to these things in recent years. What's interesting, though, is the seeming contradiction in Myths 1 and 4. 1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries. Actually, some other advanced ...

College Students Better Than Professors Think?

Gary Lewandowski and David Strohmetz, psychology professors at Monmouth University, argue at Inside Higher Ed that college professors have unrealistic expectations of their students.  They begin poorly, with several paragraphs of the "both professors and students have shortcomings" variety.  But they eventually hit on an essential truth: We run the risk of using our own past experience as the default comparison ...

College Sports Scandal Blame Games

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying.  But she makes a good point here about the fact that those who enable cheating never seem to get much attention: Everybody notices the crooked defiant coach, the hapless sputtering president, the anonymous guys on the academic support staff who sit next ...

77% Oklahoma High School Students Can’t Name 1st President?

A recent survey of Oklahoma public high school students found that the overwhelming majority can't answer even simple questions about U.S. government and history. A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. About 92 percent of the people ...

Midnight College

Boston's Bunker Hill Community College is experimenting with midnight classes.  Wick Sloane, who teaches a full class from 11:45 pm to 2:45 am, explains: Two thirds of my class this morning enrolled at midnight because all the day, evening and weekend sections were full. The rest have night jobs, most of them at hospitals, and one is a taxi dispatcher. Almost ...

Obama’s Education Speech

Matt Yglesias takes mock exception to President Obama's assertion to our nation's schoolchildren that "You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it." He notes that, "My father dropped out of tenth grade and has had a totally solid career as ...

College Rankings

Washington Monthly has put out its annual answer to the US News college rankings, even going so far as to launch a new blog devoted to the subject. Steve Benen highlights some of the findings: * Only one of the U.S. News top ten universities -- Stanford -- makes the Washington Monthly's top ten, while high profile institutions such as Princeton, Duke ...

Yes We Cannabis

Lisa Jack, who snapped this picture of Barack Obama in 1980 while they were students at Occidental College, is a wee bit irritated that NORML repurposed it to create this poster: Fair use satire? Or theft of intellectual property? I'm not an attorney and intellectual property law is particularly complicated.  NORML is engaging in political satire, for which the courts have tended ...

Meritocracy’s Limits

Stacy McCain, who along with myself is among the most notable graduates of Jacksonville State University*, laments the sense of superiority that comes with the increasingly meritocratic nature of American higher education.  Essentially, because the Ivy Leagues are now more open to the most intellectually gifted students, its graduates believe they must therefore be the best and the brightest and ...

Ricks: Close Service Academies, War Colleges

Thomas Ricks believes that we should shutter West Point and the other service academies because they're expensive and, as far as he can tell, they produce no better officers than ROTC.  Plus, their instructors don't have PhDs, making them essentially junior colleges. The first of these assertions is thinly sourced but worth exploring.   The second, though, is rather silly.  About a ...

Robert Reich: It’s a Depression

Robert Reich points out that, if we make up a new way of counting unemployment, we've got a lot of unemployment: The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real ...

Academic Hiring: Year of No Jobs

For years, there's been talk of a wave of Baby Boomer faculty retirements that would finally break the logjam that has made it difficult for newly minted PhDs to find jobs. The waiting continues: Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse ...

Working Hard – Or Hardly Working?

Matt Yglesias challenges Lisa Schiffren's assertion that "The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians)." Matt counters, reasonably enough, that guys who move furniture for a living work very hard and that ...

Cramming for Exams Not Working Hard

Joining the College grading expectations debate a little late, Alan Jacobs makes a point most of us glossed over entirely:  even if we decide that it matters how hard the students worked matters, how would we measure that? Monitoring students on webcams to see how much time they spend writing, or with their noses in books? Even that wouldn't let me ...

College Grading: An ‘A’ for Effort?

College students increasingly expect to be rewarded for trying hard, Max Roosevelt claims in NYT: “Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.” He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement. “I tell my ...