So now the Junior Senator from my state of residence is in Iraq. Lovely.
The Washington Post has a good story on Turnitin.com, a plagiarism-detection site many of my colleagues use.
Interesting article in the Washignton Post about polygamy in Indonesia.
The initial anecdote strikes me, with my exceptionally shallow knowledge of Islamic law, as not a normal polygamous marriage. I believe that one is supposed to have the consent of wife one and the ability to support the wives and their offspring equally (or equitably, I dunno). That, however, is a legal ideal. I don't know if it would invalidate the 2nd marriage. I am sure that in most systems women don't have the right to initiate divorce, though. She's staying with him for the children, she says.
There's certainly at least one very high-profile polygamist -- a vice president has 3 wives. The president is the daughter of a multiple marriage herself. There's an entrepreneur using viral marketing, even.
Prof. Tyler Cowen has a link on the Volokh Conspiracy to a blogged lecture which is more disclaimer than it is explanation of why we should click and read. This is, I suppse, a response to the criticism flying around the blogosphere about the practice. Prof. Leiter had a particularly sharp exchange with Prof. Larry Solum on the subject.
I tend to agree with those more concerned about the dangers of misrepresentaiton rather than those concerned with reading someone's immediate reaction -- but then (aca-heresy, where we're supposed to say "all the cutting edge work goes on at conferences") I don't put all that much trust in the genre "conference paper".
I frequently have a strongly positive reaction to conference papers which slowly fades into questions that didn't occur to me until the flight home when the opportunity to ask them is gone. Worse than that, I have never read a paper in a "published proceedings" that I thought was very much like what I heard at the conference. First -- in the humanities scholars are always given the opportunity to double or treble their length. Second, I've read far too many where "taking the questions into account" meant cleaning up the parts that were just flat wrong. These people are truly writing something other than what they've said (I can think of at least one example in which the thesis of a paper altered directions considerably. In one case I went to the trouble of looking up the abstract in the conference program to confirm my confusion.). In other words, an honest report of the conference paper would not only have been denied by the scholar but then "disproved" by the published version. The text-as-delivered (if someone is so painful as to read a paper to an audience) might help, but that's never what gets published.
Then of course there's the problem of misunderstanding (slightly different from my first point about questions that come later). Plenty of people are so bad at the podium that they can only be evaluated on paper.
Oh, well. All in all, blogging is a subspecies of journalism rather than of academic writing -- and I would never expect inexperienced interviewers to get fast-moving conversation right without tape.
So, go read the second hand report if you like. Surely we all had the constraints in mind in the first place.
I just got my first Paris Hilton porn spam (or at least that's what I suppose it was). The subject said "Paris wants you!" I deleted it anyway.
MIT made 1.1% on its endowment last year. Harvard is claiming 12.5%. So says CNN.
Well, I do the math for you -- but check it yourself.
Baltimore City schools, about 100,000 students. (99,859 according to this.)
Budget last year, nearly $900,000,000, according to CNN.
Rounding and all, about $9,000 per student.
Tuition at local Catholic high schools? Here's one for $8,000, exclusive of photography labs and AP courses. Baltimore is also home to one of those Jesuit tuition-free schools, too. Middle school only, but it can be done.
The CFO, by the way, is going to spend more time with his family and explore other career opportunities. You know, whoever invented the "spend more time with my family" line really should have trademarked it.
GWB was in Iraq. HRC was in Afghanistan. Well, I'm thankful the country was made peaceful enough for her visit by the current administration. Maybe she'll follow through on her calls for more troops for Afghanistan when she's president.
I was going to say something sharp about the Los Angeles master/slave wackiness, but the Old Oligarch beat me to it. Read. Laugh. Weep for the use of metaphor in America.
CNN is still hedging its bets on the "allegedly used in sniper shottings" which is "authorities say" where convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad lurked to do his deeds.
But of course we can't believe what anyone says -- including juries.
After all, it might have been a different Caprice the two were sitting in when they were arrested. This one might have been faked up by the same people who took care of the lunar landings and who are have jackbooted reveries about the future of Amerika.
Every now and then one runs across an example of nationalistic narrowness that leads one to weeping -- the Oxford Medieval Texts series is one of those.
You see, if you skim the list there are about 65 volumes (some of which were produced in the 50s and early 60s), of which 7 are not material written in the British Isles or by Anglo-Normans who made their reputation on the Continent (like the 2 volumes of John of Salisbury, who was bishop of Chartres).
The exceptions were 2 volumes of Abelard, some letters of Gregory VII, the Gesta Francorum, Letters of Fulbert of Chartres, Letters of Peter of Celle, and a volume of early Franciscan material.
You see, even such an important series as this -- the only series of left-and-right medieval Latin texts published by an English-language press that has run to more than 3 or 4 volumes (that I know of just off hand) can't break the Insular trap.
I'm teaching out of a good book on gender and archaeology next term written by a British professor. After the prehistoric most of her examples are British. It's no different elsewhere -- French art historians tend to write about French monastic buildings as though the Rhineland -- let alone Italy -- didn't have monastic architecture.
It's all very distressing. I had never noticed the Oxford series example until I started to order the volumes to fill in the gaps in our library and realized how few texts I actually care about buying for students to read (really, English administrative history! WHO could edit, let alone translate, the Dialogus de Scaccario! And it has a 2nd edition!).
If a WMD strike took out Washington, D.C. during congressional session* things would be a mess.
Juan Cole thinks it's terrible the military might think it should take over -- after all less than 10% of the officers vote D, Prof. Cole thinks.
That's a higher diversity rate than what I read about the professoriate. And, all in all, in a group that would at least DO something (even if the wrong thing some of the time), unlike the professoriate.
Of course, the idea that in the utter destruction of the executive and legislative branches of government in an WMD strike there would be a civilian group to fall back on is a little strange -- who does Prof. Cole want to take over? The Park Service? State governors?
Oh, well -- he's a professor of history whose specialty is variant Islam**, so his qualifications are somewhat higher than mine. After all, he's a full professor. Which makes his opinions more responsible than what he describes as the "fevered dreams" of Tommy Franks.
Prof. Brian Leiter refers to this as the opinion of "a distinguished historian at the University of Michigan" without mentioning history of what. Professors of Middle Eastern history, when they talk about things like this, are about as much use as professors of law and philosophy and professors of medieval art. Which is to say that we are expressing our opinions.
Tommy Franks, on the other hand, might actually have some clear idea about what a WMD strike would entail.
On the other hand, perhaps this is part of Prof. Leiter's long-range project to remind people what a good university they have in Ann Arbor? I understand his "Philosophical Gourmet Report" to be a salutary long-range effort to get people to think about the numbers and the people of professional philosophy and realize that commonly held repuations of greatness (e.g., Yale) aren't necessarily the best places for the study of philosophy.
*By the way, since we're talking 'opinion', I certainly hope that the Pentagon, to reify things a bit, has plans about what to do about authority and chains of command in case of a WMD strike -- wasn't that what Cold War planning was all about? Why should that part shock anyone? Nor am I shocked that General Franks, who never particularly impressed me, stuck his foot in his mouth with what Prof. Cole reads as his fevered dreams of goose-stepping Amerika (honest -- go click and see). Nor does it surprise me that distinguished professors of history talk that way about retired generals -- but then I think I've expressed my relative opinion of the two institutions above. And over and over.**Shi'a, especially, from book titles, with two books on Baha'i subjects and 3 tranlsations from Khalil Gibran that I turned up on Amazon -- our campus network is still a little cranky so I can't use the databases from home.
Least Recently Played -- that is to say things you keep forgetting you had!
Revolution - Stereophonics - Jools Holland's Big Band Rhythm & Blues
Sweet Thang - Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information
Tabou - Les Nubians - Princesses Nubiennes
Daydreamin' - Kelli Sae - NeoSoul United
Miskin - Faudel - Baida
Downtown Lights - Annie Lennox - Medusa
Anima Processional - Sequentia - Hildegard von Bingen
. . . and the beat goes on!
Saddam's mass graves. 49 pages of pictures when I checked. How often again?
I find Radley Balko pretty convincing this morning on the AARP-GOP alliance made in hell -- the AARP realizes that the current GOP has no detectable spine when it comes to spending, so the AARP will accept a plan with some 'restraints'.
Blogging takes time, and sometimes people get busy. Miss McArdle and Mr. Dreck have slowed down considerably, for instance. However, Mr. Green is back in form lately. And who knew I would actually get interesting in the story of medical chemistry (I won't claim to actually care about the molecules)? Dr. Lowe is entirely responsible.
I'm just too young to care (born 1962 -- I suppose I was in a crib when JFK was shot).
History will have something to say about JFK (as opposed to the "current events show" of American history and political science) in about 50 years when the protectors are all dead and all the archives are open.
Until then, weep if you like for a life cut short. Since I'm not a sentimalist, a conspiracy theorist, a believer that Vietnam is the central fact of contemporary life, or a Democrat, I'm going to enjoy the second day of unbearable sun in a row.
An earnest Scot (his name is Menzies Cambell -- sounds like a relative of mine) actually met GWBush and says "I was not persuaded by what he said, but I was most certainly surprised at the extent to which the caricature of him was inaccurate.”
Whaddya know.
Odd day in the Finger Lakes -- perfect perfect perfect weather in the 60s (yes, in late November!) and a campus network shutdown because of a virus* -- and on a day when I don't teach. So two long walks, calling colleagues on the great 19th century invention instead of emailing, and generally pretending like I'd gone a Mayin'.
*though skeptics suggested Monday night's shutdown to "upgrade" the system might have some influence. I was early to a public lecture and pulled out the laptop to get some work done and the a.v. guys were chortling with me about Macintosh immunity -- they're an all-Mac shop and were able to work today.
The Chief Rabbi of France recommends baseball caps over skullcaps on the street.
I suppose the dealer thought it would add cachet to the manuscript that it was looted by the Nazis?
The Bloomberg administration is against smoking but is for DANCING? And here we all thought he was just a busybody puritan.
Declaring her intention of putting "the dance police" out of business, Gretchen Dykstra, the commissioner of the city's Department of Consumer Affairs, called for scrapping the old cabaret licenses. In their place, she said, the city should issue new "nightlife licenses" that would allow it to regulate the unwanted side effects of nightlife that people really care about: noise, disorderly crowds and filthy sidewalks.
Here's yet another article about the situation at the WTC site, this time about memorials proper. I really don't know what I think should be done (though I know the one on the right, "suspended votives," looks like interior decoration of the worst kind). Here's an opinion piece on the topic.
Both the architectural project and now the memorials suffer from big cases of "too many cooks" -- and in an event of this magnitude too many people not only have opinons but have a burning emotional connection.
On an important level artists have to be allowed to make the memorials. Yes, people should choose between them (in fact, I'd be surprised if there don't end up being memorials or statements in building lobbies and plazas all over lower Manhattan, but then I grew up in Chattanooga, one of the epicenters of the late 19th century war memorial).
Prof. Volokh offers two "they told us so" comments. Given the source, quite interesting. Phllis Schlafly said it would be like this and Polygamous and Incestuous Marriages. Such a pity when people so roundly disliked prove to be right.
I do think that some of the gay marriage advocates have been disingenuous about these issues. Nevertheless, the stories of Caligula marrying his horse are false. We'll see if adult-interspeciesist unions become legal in Massachusetts.
I'm an afficionado of slippery-slope results after abortion ("oh, no! this isn't going to lead to..."), but read Stanley Kurtz for what Andrew Sullivan derides as silly or alarmist. Yes, there are polygamists. I'm sure there are polyamorists.
Anyone want to define an American legal marriage as a union between two (see the Kurtz link) adult (not a hard sell, but lets not pretend it's obvious to everyone) humans (easy sell) not within the bounds of consanguinuity (whose definitions even now vary from state to state)? I'm sure Andrew Sullivan would buy into it. But once we drag the "fulfillment and happiness" argument in, who's to exclude any of these?
At Miami University of Ohio they're renovating dorms to serve the -- on average -- 18 appliances each student brings from home. For those of us who went to school in the lost era of "no hotplates allowed!" this is amazing. The article has lots of numbers from different campuses. Yet another reason I'm glad to be a professor and not an administrator!
. . . but the New York Times puts an article about a raid on Michael Jackson's ranch in the Arts section. Sad.
"The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture."
I suppose if stealing from each other keeps the place from breaking out in its usual 30-year cycle of death and destruction EU agricultural policy isn't such a bad thing.
---is that this family isn't. Ashley's mother, you see, believes that education is about socialization.
Admittedly, with the standards that we've got only getting through a reduced amount of the 3rd grade curriculum won't be academically problematic -- but what if your child is in the core group the administrators are moving up with Ashley (see end of article)? I'm happy the children are learning compassion -- really! I'm a nice Catholic and believe that compassion for others is a good thing! They're learning team-work, too, that other be-all-and-end-all of contemporary life.
Someday the separation will come.* By late middle school, when, as the article says, "...Amy begins quadratic equations, Ashley could** still be trying to identify her numbers" will Ashley be present in an algebra class? Or will someone have finally realized that people doing different things don't always belong together just because they're the same age.
*from my response to a comment -- I strongly believe Ashley has every right to whatever quality of life we can afford her -- but where do we draw the line in calling that "School"? 5th Grade? Algebra? College? Does Ashley deserve to be with people her age in a structured environment until she is 18, and then that right ceases? Given the argument as presented so far, I'd say "yes." The government is compelled to allow Ashley to associate for a certain number of hours a day with other children her own age until she is some age (it may vary from state to state). After that, what will be done? Will we call that "work"?**by the way, based on the rest of the article that "could" is pretty optimistic.
Again via Ms. Jacobs I read the Mental Multivitamin's musings on the iron progression of school-college-life. I fear it would be suicidally difficult for schools like mine (we depend on the conformity track and college open house visits and admissions officers visiting captive audiences in high school guidance counselor lounges) but I wish more people started college at 20.
Further: One of the strange benefits of homeschooling that I didn't anticipate is the breakdown of birthday-based apartheid (or, as opponents of home schooling like to call it, "socialization") in which you never have a course with someone who is out of your age cohort unless that person was held back or jumped forward (my grammar school class had one of the former and maybe one of the latter).
I wish my callow utes had someone a smidge older to associate with. I don't see it happening here because of our rural setting. Agnes Scott, a women's college in Decatur (that's not Atlanta, thank you very much), GA, has been running a program for 25 years for women who Return to College. The RTC students were frequently our best and almost always our most interesting folks. They were an exciting leaven to any class -- and we got 'em the old fashioned liberal arts college way: we gave 'em scholarships.
Well. No. I wasn't. Maybe the reporter who actually met homeschoolers saw some light in the darkness, but read this opinion piece from yesterday. The solution proposed to problems like the evil people who starved the four boys in New Jersey is further regulation of home schooling.
How many visits did the (now, happily, unemployed) social workers make? 38, says News Day. The Times didn't mention that part in their editorial.
Why should we believe that government regulation of homeschooling would make it safer? Safer than, say, foster care, which they regulate so inefficiently?
via Ms. Jacobs. Read her more often.
No, homeschooling isn't a "magic bullet" -- but maybe it's a wooden stake through the heart of those who know better for you?
Yes, many people can't take advantage of homeschooling.
Many people who could aren't, yet. Give 'em time and more drug raids and maybe they'll come around.
Oh - and argument-by-worst-example? I'll stop it when they stop it.
Christopher Reeve, Cyborg.
Have you seen blogs with a templated "recent comments" section? If I did you would see, in this order, spam, Dick, and warfare between cheerleaders and band members. I guess they're googling the topic and finding me?
I know, I know -- the chronology is off. Those Cro Magnon Democrats produced all the finer things in life and we Neanderthalers just grunt in corners and die off.
Friedrich Blowhard has a most interesting post on cave art and religion -- and art and religion in general. There's a followup from Michael.
Just 3 out of 4 gubernatorial races. A 48% finish for a statewide Republican, let alone a Child-of-Immigrants-of-Color* in Louisiana is still more than a little amazing. I'm sure the stratego-pundits are questioning Jindal's decision to not have Bush campaign for him.
Three summers ago one of my colleagues, a French woman who has lived in America for a long time, came back from a summer visiting family and announced how safe France is an dhow there were just no problems with street violence. That was before I started reading Merde in France and learned that the Red Belt of my French course days has become the Islamic Gang Belt.
But still -- I have yet to ask her if she'd rather be a head-covering Muslim woman in America or a head-covering Jew in France. I know that if I wanted my children to grow up Jewish I might be thinking of emigration. I know that if I had previously wanted them to receive a Jewish education I would be rethinking that decision. Or hiring more guards.
I don't have an answer. Nor do "market forces" -- believe me, marketing people qua marketing people have been on board at major museums for more than 20 years and they haven't found one yet.
David Nishimura at Cronaca found this on museum admission fees:
Five of the 10 costliest art galleries in the world are in the US, according to a new survey. A poll in The Art Newspaper suggests the Guggenheim in New York and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts are the most costly, at $15 (£8.89) a ticket. In third place is London's Saatchi Gallery, recently opened on the South bank, which costs £8.50.Other US galleries in the top ten include the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Professor Mark Kleiman asks a related question (the first half of which is from someone named "Mike O'Hare" who I haven't come across):
With important paintings fetching eight-figure sums at auction, the aggregate value of the collection of a big art museum's collection represents billions of dollars. Why don't the boards of those museums ask the managers to show that they are producing, in some nonfinancial but quantifiable sense, an adequate return on that stock of capital?Here's my more pointed version of that question: Why are most art museums open most afternoons and few or no evenings? If a clothing store in a mall stays open twelve hours seven days a week, why doesn't the art museum?
And once you had it open at times when people who work or go to school socialize, what could you do to make it one of the cool places in town to hang out?
I dunno. Working men's hours were a marketing experiment of the Ruskin-influenced 19th century arts world (funded by Robber Barons like Andrew Carneigie and, I think, the Vanderbilts even before there were such things as "foundations"). That typically meant evening and weekend hours (weekend hours survive, evening hours are much less common) and "free days" (many fee-museums maintain a free weekday).
Museums I'm familiar with have tried events in late hours to encourage museum-going among the dreaded yuppie classes (the High Museum in Atlanta is a downright meat market, which indeed as Prof. Kleiman suggests can make a collection a little more exciting).
The sad truth is that without school-children (most of whom visit between 10 a.m. and lunch, Tuesday-Friday) most museums' attendence figures would entirely collapse and they would be even less able to convince gimlet-eyed financial types they were worthy of support because people came. And the school outreach is all done because we think it's good for them and maybe some of them will become museum-goers in later life. It doesn't work very well, does it?
Now regular readers surely can tell I'm no populist, but I insist that my idea of elitism is a voluntarist elitism -- anyone is welcome to come join us on the lower slopes of Parnassus. There are no birth or national origin requirements, just some educational and aspirational prerequisites. Therefore I'm exactly the kind of art historian who wishes that fine arts were more popular. Maybe not so popular that the crowds were always as at impressionist blockbusters, but popular enough that there were always people standing in front of paintings.
I don't see it anywhere. The museum folks have worked to do it. What else can be done?
Cell-phone jammers! Via Gizmodo. Buy one for the teacher on your list!
I saw my first snow-plow-attachment on a pickup truck this morning. All is lost! Flee!
Further, 12.54 p.m. -- Now I see why the snow-plow-attachments went on last night. It's not good. Faugh on your 41 degrees, Shelton!
I'm all in favor of letting George Soros spend as much as he likes and Richard Mellon Scaife spend as much as he likes. John Kerry ought to be able to blow his wife's late husband's money any way his wife pleases, too. All this campaign reform is so transparently silly and useless -- is anyone convinced it's not a full-employment act for lawyers and lobbyists who can explain to politicians how to use and abuse this new set of rules?
And given what I think about the Democrat's chance in 2004 I think that beggaring Mr. Soros by 15 million isn't such a bad thing, either.
Professor Brian Leiter is worried about what some people tell him about the health consequences of the 2nd Iraq War. He might consider the same organization's press releases from a year ago. I hope he doesn't think googling the name of the organization makes me a lapdog -- after all, we're both way out of field.
I, for one, spent too long on the same campus as the CDC to take public health officials at their word, though; anecdotal evidence, but then this is a blog. (My favorite CDC acquaintance worked in a department that answered the phone "Diarrhea!" in an especially chipper tone of voice. He was frequently lowered from hovering helicopters onto the heaving decks of cruise ships in the midst of -- umm -- awkward epidemics. Made me want to take a cruise even less.)
If problems can be solved by throwing money at them reusing injection needles is certainly one of them. This seems a lot easier to address than the drug-combination issues for AIDS medications -- and between this and mother-infant transmission couldn't we make a dent in AIDS increase?
(I noticed this at the Posted by crankyprofessor at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)
Mickey Kaus's response to some protest over his Krugman 'Gotcha' Contest encapsulates the rules of blogging:
a) I make the rules around here, buddy; b) Employment, under the revised figures issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been growing for three months. Would Krugman refrain from I-told-you-soing if jobs had gone down for the past three months? c) Besides, if we wait, the economy might turn sour and Krugman would be right again. Where's the fun in that?
Yes, the New York Times, such lovely people. The stated assumption is that homeschoolers are hippies or fundamentalists and the subject of the article are exceptional. Noxious bozos. An "expert" brings up the abuse issue. See the post just before this for my response. In further detail -- yeah, if we put them all in cryogenic containers we could keep them all even safer. Reread -- the woman's impulse to homeschool came from bullying, an admitted national problem in schools.
On the other hand, free publicity, free publicity. The people in the photo have no more than one head apiece, the family featured has a great story -- Government Schooling will shrink by another few families because of this example. Better this way than the Texas Method.
Read it and homeschool (scroll to Sunday or Saturday, November 9 or 8). I'm especially amused (not horrified -- I expect no better from the people who so frequently run government schools) that no drugs were found. Actually, i do expect better. I am not surprised there were no drugs but I am surprised they ran this sort of raid.
Please -- no comments about how "not all public school administrators are like that." Thank goodness! Too many are, though -- far, far too many. If I had children I would be making every accomodation possible to be certain that no one with an Ed.D. in Secondary Education ever saw them face-to-face.
Just remember -- an evil home-school family only harms a few children. An evil high school teacher (or merely an incompetent one) can harm a few hundred per term. For 30 years. An evil administrator can harm everyone in the school. The odds are in favor of the home-schooled to come out less damaged.
Further: Professor Reynolds comments at TCS.
Do you remember that It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is all about $350,000 dollars? Split 4 ways. Or 8 ways (says Ethel Merman, dividing by the person rather than the vehicle). 1963 was a long time ago. I don't think I'd engage in that kind of driving for $90,000, and certainly not for $45,000. My goodness how heist amounts have changed!
Oh, my. Is Dick Shawn the most underrated dancer of the 1960s? Think of The Producers! Think of the twist scenes in this -- umm - "film".
This doesn't make me feel better about the state of the World -- American missions in Saudi Arabia are closing.
Why are we still pretending?
Science proves it so we can believe it.
Gosh it must be annoying to have to talk to science reporters.
Professoressa N. Chana nails it -- Hogwarts is full of bad teachers. She also points out in detail why the History of Magic OUGHT to have been more interesting and useful. Me, I may not bother with any more of the books (the excessive adverb use is really getting to me), but the problem with pedagogy is something that ought to be addressed. Or maybe it's after-life tenure?
You read Miss Tushnet every day, don't you? Not that she can be trusted to update every day, but she's pretty dependable. I lifted an epigram from her this week to go on my office door for November:
"Leeches and bleeding served a similar purpose in previous models of the body. However, we moderns 'express our feelings' in lieu of our fluids, because everyone knows that those who don't are more disease-prone, and more subject to cancer, ulcers, or a host of other dire ailments."
--Against Love
Then CNN.com puts Rosie O'Donnell up with this headline: Cancer survivor: Rosie O'Donnell told her liars 'get cancer'
Lovely. Pre-modern medicine in editorial board meetings -- admittedly for Rosie, the Magazine, but still! And people lump flat-earthers and Republicans in the same sentence.
O.K. - it's grey but not really cold yet, so why am I already in Fingerlakes Winter Syndrome Depression? Dunno, but I'm not sanguine about the future of the University in America. Via the ever-informative Ms. Joanne Jacobs I read an interesting post on a business blog called Calico Cat (nice graphic! better story about why it's called that) about student loans and disincentives to be a humanities major. Mr. Kantor ended with an interesting suggestion to help us understand that old saw about "people with college educations make more money." I'm excerpting two paragraphs:
So I ask, why do we make students waste their time and money on college when they are so obviously not learning very much? It is often cited that people with college degrees have higher average earnings than people without college degrees, but the reasons for why that's the case are seldom explored. Compared to the typical non-college graduate, the typical college graduate (1) did better academically in high school and demonstrated better reading and math skills on the SAT; (2) is more motivated to obtain a higher paying career; and (3) comes from an economically better off family and is more likely to have family connections that lead to better jobs.From the above paragraph, we see that comparing college graduates to non-college graduates is not a valid comparison, so no conclusion can be drawn about whether college education is truly providing a pecuniary benefit that exceeds the cost of the college education. Furthermore, part of the benefit has to do with credentialism. Employers value the college degree even though the college education hasn't made the person with the degree a better employee. To the extent that credentialism helps college graduates obtain better employment, this benefits the individual with the degree who obtains the better job, but it doesn't benefit society as a whole.
Yes, I'm having one of those grading-midterms-and-wondering-why-people-come-to-college-at-all periods. Mr. Kantor interviews college graduates and is disappointed with their non-mastery of simple concepts, too.
Three Kings. Whatever that stupid Clint Eastwood Second German War version of that was (I forget -- I don't like Clint much except as Dirty Harry). Reality.
Another step toward the Dissolution of the Universities . . . a story written by someone suing Princeton to get the money BACK. When the rich people don't think we'll do the right thing with the money, we'll be forced to live on tuition -- and we can't afford to DO that.
The Irascible Professor has the story of a sad classroom technology development.
Letters to the editor don't get much more blunt than these two.
Why did the Post reporter distort so willfully?
The real Iraq debacle seems more and more to be for the Media rather than for the Bush administration.