But what about the Smug Points?

Interesting. An analysis of the results of that Ivy League college vs. the state land-grant college shows no difference.

These researchers tracked two groups of students—one that attended college in the 1970s and another in the early 1990s. They wanted know: Did students attending the most elite colleges earn more in their 30s, 40s, and 50s than students with similar SAT scores, who were rejected from those elite colleges? The short answer was no. Or, in the author’s language, the difference between the students who went to super-selective schools and the students with similar SAT scores who were rejected from those schools and went to less selective institutions was “indistinguishable from zero.”

What does that mean, exactly? It means that, for many students, “who you are” as an 18-year-old is more important than “where you go.” After correcting for a student’s pre-existing talent, ambition, and habits, it’s hard to show that highly selective colleges add much earning power, even with their vaunted professors, professional networks, and signaling. If you’re one of the roughly 50,000-100,000 students who is sweating a decision from one of these tony schools, you’re focused on the wrong thing. The decision of a group of people you’ve never met isn’t as important as the sum of the decisions, habits, and relationships you’ve built up to this point in your young life.

Or, to put it in less encouraging terms, college isn’t a vehicle for upward mobility. There is an important exception, though.

For the elite colleges themselves, the Dale-Krueger paper had an additional, fascinating finding. The researchers found that the most selective schools really do make an extraordinary difference in life earnings for “black and Hispanic students” and “students who had parents with an average of less than 16 years of schooling.”

In other words, getting into Princeton if your parents went to Princeton? Fine, although not a game-changer. But getting into Princeton if your parents both left community college after a year? That could be game-changing. There are several potential explanations, but I’m most persuaded by one that Dale and Krueger put in their conclusions section. Minority students from less-educated families are more likely to rely on colleges to provide the internship and job networks that come automatically from living in a rich neighborhood with wealthy parents.

As the article points out, though, the students who would benefit most are the least likely to get in — the big name colleges have an interest in perpetuating the status quo and protecting the social hierarchy, so through mechanisms like “legacy” admissions (jeez, but I hate “legacies” — I saw too many brilliant undergrads fail to get into med school while their less competent, lazy peers sailed in on their parents’ status) they police who is admitted.

Anyway, I’m at a state university — apply to the University of Minnesota and specifically Morris! Our new motto will be “We’re not worse than Harvard.”

The ongoing commodification of education

oprah

You get a degree, and you get a degree, and you get a degree! Everyone gets a degree! All you have to do is show up and, incidentally, cough up for a continuously increasing tuition.

Nathaniel Bork was recently fired from his philosophy position at Aurora community college. There are two things going on here. One is that he was an adjunct, like the majority of instructors at Aurora, so he had virtually no power or authority, and was easily firable — there are damn few protections for temporary instructors, and that’s exactly the way the administrators like it.

The other problems is that those administrators on high have fewer concerns about the quality of an education, and are more concerned with the number of tuition-paying bodies shuffled through their doors, and also listen too carefully to those tuition-payers who want the guaranteed outcome of a certificate at the end of their “education”. They created some program optimistically called “Gateway to Success”, where “success” was defined as getting a degree rather than learning something.

Just days before Bork was terminated, he says, he drafted an email to the state’s Higher Learning Commission, complaining about Aurora’s new Gateway to Success initiative. The goal of the program was to increase pass rates in these gatekeeper courses but, Bork said, in reality, he’d been asked to cut 20 percent of his introductory philosophy course content; require fewer writing assignments, with a new maximum of eight pages per semester; offer small-group activities every other class session; and make works by women and minority thinkers about 30 percent of the course.

Bork said he was told to keep teaching this way until 80 percent of all student demographic groups were passing the course, which in his view violated the spirit of Colorado law on guaranteed transfer courses to a four-year institution.

I approve of the idea of insisting on more diversity in the course material — a philosophy course would benefit from having more perspectives represented. Small group activities, also fine, since philosophy students should be able to communicate with each other and share ideas. But the rest…that’s simply dumbing down the course. Only 8 written pages total per semester? My impression of philosophers is that they can produce that much text while comatose and drunk after lunch.

I’m at a university with almost no temporary faculty, and talking to them you get a completely different set of concerns. We all want to increase the amount of learning students do — I’m actually talking to my discipline this afternoon about bumping up student math exposure and focusing a little more on quantitative biology, for example. Our goal isn’t to make it easier to graduate, but to make sure our students know the material well enough to succeed in a biology career.

So maybe it’s really one problem, the reliance on faculty the administration considers expendable and a reasonable sacrifice to enrollment goals. Problem solved by giving Nathaniel Bork and his colleagues tenure track positions, instead of firing them.

That might cause some other problems, I admit. Those might be solved by state governments investing in education to a degree they deserve.

Mister Rogers, hippie peacenik

In 1983, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired a series of anti-war episodes.

Thirty-four years ago, on five consecutive episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, two feuding sects representing Russia and the United States began stockpiling parts for bombs—at one point stripping the neighborhood’s arts funding to bankroll the build-up.

I guess I’m not too surprised that Fred Rogers would put on shows with a message promoting peace and criticizing building up for war. What does surprise me, though, is that they were yanked from circulation afterwards.

The episodes were pulled from syndication and future releases. While production stills reappeared over the years, and a poor-quality, five-minute clip wound up on YouTube recently, the individual episodes themselves were never surfaced again.

I wonder who complained? I wonder who at PBS listened to those complaints? It’s a disturbing kind of low profile censorship. Now, suddenly, a couple of those episodes have appeared on YouTube in a weirdly timely release. I watched one of them — it was kind of sweet to see a children’s show I haven’t watched in probably 25 years, and it reminded me of what a nice guy Rogers was — and it really is rather explicit. The King has drafted everyone to make bombs, on a kids’ show, in response to the fear that a different puppet was making bombs, and is stripping the kingdom’s economy to the point where they can’t buy record players for the schools.

It’s a fine message. It tells us that there has been some subtle propaganda going on for decades, though, that this was policed off the air.

Worst hike ever

I’ve hiked hazardous routes along the Washington coast — it’s a beautiful place with these gorgeous crescent beaches separated by spectacular rocky headlands — and before you set out you have to heed all the warnings. If you get caught on those headlands when the tide comes in, you may have to choose between going straight up a jagged, overhanging cliff or swimming out to sea in a swirl of complex currents. There are also bears.

I don’t think I’d want to hike the Broomway in England, though.

broomway

For one, at low tide, it’s a long gray mudflat. It’s not exactly scenic.

For another, the destination of your walk is a place called “Foulness Island”. This is not a name that would have been chosen by any tourism board. Saying you live on Foulness Island conjures up images of surly, decrepit villains hiding out in hovels and scheming bitterly to murder visitors and steal their shoes to enable escape. It sounds like a place infested with ticks and anthrax.

It’s worse. It’s deadly.

Depending on the time of year, you have a window of three to four hours to explore the Broomway before the tide returns. Unlike other tidal flats where the water gently rises, the speed of the incoming tide is described as faster than a person can run. Even worse, the rising waters interact with outflow from the nearby Crouch and Roach rivers to create deadly hidden whirlpools.

Nearly every site I’ve visited warns that no matter how good a swimmer you are, if you’re caught on the Broomway when the tide comes in, you’re likely to perish.

Still interested in taking a jaunt down the Broomway? You’ll first need permission from Britain’s Ministry of Defence. The military took over much of Foulness Island in the early 20th century for artillery exercises and still controls access. Adding to the path’s notoriety are large signs near the entrance warning “Do not approach or touch any object or debris as it may explode and kill you.”

In case you’re wondering, it’s the first week after Spring break, and I was already fantasizing about exotic island getaways, and this was one of the places that turned up in my google search. I think I need to come up with better search terms. Or erase my contaminating search history somehow.

When a deplorable wanker imagines himself as a supervillain…

I’ve always thought I was incredibly lucky to have such incredibly stupid enemies, but John @Scalzi has topped me. Scalzi has just come out with a new book, The Collapsing Empire. The guy who thinks he is Scalzi’s nemesis, Vox Day, has a small publishing house, and so he rushed into print a book, The Corroding Empire, to compete. Wait, you say, they just have similar titles, that’s not enough evidence to be plagiarism or an attempt to siphon off Scalzi’s sales, could it?

But then you see the covers.

empirebooks

Pathetically obvious, don’t you think?

Even more obvious, Vox Day openly announced his intentions.

When Beale announced pre-orders for The Corroding Empire, he made his mission very clear: He wanted his publishing house to do better than Tor Books and thought outperforming Scalzi with a near-identical book cover would twist the knife, adding What would be more amusing than for The Corroding Empire to outsell and outrank The Collapsing Empire? Then again, Beale’s never shied away from promoting himself or his publishing house through controversial means, including getting his followers to nominate himself and several Castalia House books for Hugo Awards during the Rabid Puppies heyday.

Beale has since announced a reprint that shortens the title to Corrosion, and changes the author’s name to Harry Seldon, parodying a character from Foundation. Some of his followers have also responded by giving Scalzi’s book negative reviews on Amazon.

That’s just sad and pitiful and weak. He’s basically admitted a desire to cling to Scalzi’s coat-tails.

Guess the crime!

Bruno Fernandes de Souza is a soccer player, and he is confident that he is not a bad guy. What crime do you think he committed to warrant a few years in prison?

In his first major interview since being released from prison, 32-year-old Bruno Fernandes de Souza said: “What happened, happened. I made a mistake, a serious one, but mistakes happens in life – I’m not a bad guy.”

Brazilian goalkeeper who ordered woman’s murder returns to football
“People tried to bury my dream because of one mistake, but I asked God for forgiveness, so I’m carrying on with my career, dude,” he said, according to the Guardian.

God forgave him, and he’s already landed a contract with a team. How bad can it be?

Answer below the fold.

[Read more…]

That’s a Minnesota kind of story

If only we had video of this daredevil stunt.

By daylight, it was clear what happened: The man blew through the stop sign at a T in the road, barreled through a yard and launched his car off a 35-foot to 40-foot embankment, clearing a span of open water on Lake Le Homme Dieu. before landing on the season’s remaining ice, Armstrong said.

The man, James Sundby, 38, of Wadena, had no drugs or alcohol in his system and he doesn’t remember what happened, said Alexandria Police Chief Rick Wyffels.

The guy then staggered into a nearby stranger’s house, turned on all the lights and the TV, and proceeded to relax until he was chased away.

I’m just impressed with how far his car had to fly to clear that open water.

alexandrialeap

(Alexandria, by the way, is the next big (pop 9000!) city to the north of Morris — we go there fairly often. Now I’m feeling challenged to try the Sundby Leap, though.)

Glistening!

On the penultimate day of Spring Break, I cleaned up my office! It looks…majestic!

officephoto

Philistines and non-academics may look at that and complain that there are still an awful lot of heaps and piles and what they would call “clutter” everywhere, but the cognoscenti will be more impressed that there are multiple clear surfaces there.

And…ermagerd! The ghost of Charles Darwin has manifested in the room! He’s…smiling! Clearly, my efforts have been blessed.