college

Perhaps because it's college graduation and reunion time, L.V. Anderson at Slate has written a column entitled "People Still Say They 'Went to College in Boston,' Meaning Harvard? Please Stop Doing This." She claims that by giving such an evasive answer, one "buy[s] into the overblown mythos of Harvard and the presumption of Ivy League superiority." Or worse, it "functions as an elitist dog whistle," and that those who may "react inelegantly" upon hearing one went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton and others are "insecure people who perhaps have not yet learned that Ivy League schools confer degrees…

And now for something completely different... Well, not really, but kind of different. I realize that my niche here has become discussing science-based medicine, evidence-based medicine, and the atrocities committed against both by proponents of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, but every so often I need a change of pace. Unfortunately, that change of pace was something I came across in the New York Times on Sunday in the form of a commentary so bad that I seriously wondered if it was a parody or a practical joke. Alas, it wasn't. I'm referring to an article by Andrew Hacker…

The Kavli Science Video Contest has wrapped up with over 260 entries! Now its time for the People's Choice Vote, in advance of the awards ceremony on April 29, in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. People's Choice Voting begins April 2 and closes April 13. Voting is easy, just view the videos on YouTube and click 'like" for your favorites. Click here to view the videos. We will be highlighting the Top 20 Finalists on our blog for the next two weeks. In today's blog get to know the first five of the top 20 Finalists: SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST:…

During his State of the Union address, President Obama spent more time talking about education than about healthcare, which he mentioned only passing. The two are connected, though, as a response from Dean Dad at Confessions of a Community College Dean reminds us: In reference to yesterday's post about cost (among other things), a commenter asked how I could assert ever-rising costs for colleges in the face of flat salaries for faculty. That's an easy one. Costs include much more than salaries. The elephant in the room for any discussion of labor costs is health insurance. When the cost of…

It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball: An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…

The New York Times today has a story with the provocative title Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences, about a program at Mount Sinai that allows students to go to med school without taking the three things most dreaded by pre-meds: physics, organic chemistry, and the MCAT: [I]t came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation's top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements. Until then, despite being the daughter of a…

Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it is pretty predictable. I was surprised by one thing in their list of commonly assigned books this year, though: What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses),…

I'm having a little trouble typing, because the temperature in my office at the moment is around 55 F, and my hands are getting really cold. This is because of "deferred maintenance," which means "we're saving money by not maintaining the air-handling systems in our academic buildings (among other things)." The budget has been tight every year since I got here, and this building is fairly old, so things don't work as well as they might. The background noise while I'm typing is the sound of construction on the new Wold Building (webcam link). This is a multi-million-dollar new building…

tags: education, academic achievement, university, college, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Michael S. McPherson, book review The second book review I've ever published in Nature Magazine appeared last week, roughly the same time I was on a trans-Atlantic flight from NYC to Frankfurt, Germany. Due to my lack of wireless and jet lag, I've neglected to mention this until now. This review discusses a book that I think is very important for everyone involved in higher education to read and think about: Crossing…

Like every other night for the past few weeks my phone rang at about 9:45 PM. It was the same number again. For years the number had intermittently shown up on my caller ID, and I recalled that it was for some sort of Rutgers survey. At this point I just wanted the annoying late-night calls to stop, so I decided to pick up the phone. I had remembered correctly. It was a survey about my experience at Rutgers. Most of the questions were pretty standard (i.e. "What did you like best about Rutgers?", "Did you participate in any activities?"), but I did not realize their more sinister purpose…

One of the most maddening aspects of my college education was that despite the dull and useless nature of many of my required courses I had no choice but to take them. You just can't buck tradition, everyone said, even if no one quite remembers why the tradition was started in the first place. Charles Darwin felt much the same during his time at the University of Edinburgh, and he too tried to only attend lectures that were of interest to him. Charles' father did not care for his son's lackadaisical attitude towards school, though, and in an 1826 letter Charles' sister Susan Elizabeth relayed…

So, I was in the student computer lab helping a student with a numerical calculation. I couldn't help notice the student next to me was registering for classes. Here is here strategy: Look at required courses. Check available classes. Check ratemyprofessor.com. Re-check available classes. Repeat. So? What is wrong with this? I see a couple of problems. First is the reliability of ratemyprofessor (RMP). I have not looked at my ratings on this site in a long long time, but I am sure they are not accurate. My favorite RMP comment: Dr. Allain teaches astronomy 101 like it was a 400…

This is pretty cool. The new website Academic Earth has posted real college lectures from a variety of courses for free viewing. Since they are videos of actual courses it is just like being in class. There are only a smattering of subjects presently available but it might be a good resource if there's a course you always wanted to take but never got the chance to. Even better, no grades!

Am I a scientist? It seems like a simple question requiring little more than a "yes" or "no", yet I am at a loss as to how to answer it. Even though I have been called a scientist by people I respect I cannot bring myself to use the term to describe myself. It is not that I am holding onto some vaunted ideal of what a scientist is or should be. It is not as if a PhD, a prestigious academic prize, or a paper in Science is required to lay claim to the title. Instead I think of a scientist as someone who actively participates in research (or has done so in the past) and shares the results of…

For my DC peeps: I've been helping one of my colleagues with an event for college journalists, to be held next Friday at NIH (Bethesda, MD). It's a roundtable discussion on the challenges of covering addiction issues; scheduled guests include Lisa Stark of ABC News, Lauran Neergaard from the AP, and Jacqueline Duda of the WaPo, as well as scientists from NIH, NIDA, the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan. The event is free and open to college students at regional institutions of higher learning. There is still some space left, so if you know any DC-area college students who…

I'm about to enter the Spring 2009 semester, a term that will probably be one of the most difficult I have ever faced. (For me, at least, the fall semester is always good and the spring is invariably wretched.) What has made it worse is the fact that I am required to shell out $60 for a course packet for one of my courses. Chad has recently written about the difficulties surrounding high-priced textbooks, but this is a little different. This is not a textbook, but a specially-selected collection of papers and articles assembled by the professors that could very easily be made available on the…

I'll soon be off to take my math exam (at least I get it over with early...), so in honor of the occasion, here are a two snippets of comedic confusion over arithmetic; And in a similar vein;

more music charts

The results for the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship are in, and, I'm sad to say, I did not win. I came in 5th, and the winners were The Burnt Orange Report, USS Mariner, and American Papist. I must admit that I am little disappointed, but as I have said before, I wasn't expecting to win. It's not all bad, though. For making it to the final 20, I received $100, but what I am more grateful for is the support of my readers, friends, and fellow bloggers. By the end I racked up about 2,100 votes, which was far more than most of my competitors received. More importantly, I appreciate everyone who…

With a little less than a week to go, I have fallen behind in the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship contest. Thanks to the many links and referrals I received from friends during the weekend and the beginning of the week I was able to hold on to third, but later this week The Burnt Orange Report came out of nowhere and buried me. At present I'm barely holding on to 4th, with the MIT Admissions blog catching up. Even if I was able to make it back into the top 3, the far-and-away leader of this contest is the USS Mariner, a sports analysis blog. With nearly 7,000 votes, it is doubtful that anyone…