Quotulatiousness

July 3, 2012

Ontario government considering “streamlining” universities, reducing from four-year to three-year degree programs

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

I rarely find anything interesting in Heather Mallick’s Toronto Star writings, but her Sunday article on possible Ontario government changes to the university system raises some valid concerns:

The Ontario government has run a hasty educational reform plan up a flagpole and is hoping you’ll salute it. Don’t.

The discussion paper, titled “Strengthening Ontario’s Centres of Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge,” is as mystifying as the gentlewomen’s pompous, verbose porn novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which reads to me as if it were written by a small weird girl-child, or perhaps Conrad Black.

Without Star education reporter Kristin Rushowy to translate the jargon — which curses the education sector more than any other — I would not have known that basically the McGuinty government wants to cut four-year university degrees to three and “support flexible degree structures that provide new learning options made possible by advancements in technology,” which means online degrees.

[. . .]

This report heralds bad things for Ontario students.

I opposed ending Grade 13 and was proved right, universities frantically offering catch-up courses for students who couldn’t spell or add. I opposed the “30% Off Ontario Tuition Grant for students from middle-income families” that the report boasts of, because the $160,000 cut-off is far too high. I opposed turning colleges into universities because a diploma is just as valuable as a degree, but they are not interchangeable.

And I oppose cutting degrees to three years, not just because other provinces and countries won’t accept this, but because fourth year is when you come into your own intellectually. The report refers repeatedly to the unfortunately titled Bologna Declaration aimed at harmonizing EU higher education — trans. “Yurp does it so we can too” — although I note that there has been talk in Britain of “accelerated” two-year degrees, at which point I despair.

H/T to the Phantom Observer for the link, who twittered:

https://twitter.com/PhantomObserver/statuses/220178327166648321

June 1, 2012

QotD: Debunking the notion that today’s students face “unprecedented” challenges

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Far from being penalized, this generation may be the most privileged ever. Every generation lives through challenges. Our grandparents or great-grandparents lived in a society of gross social inequality and endured a world war that consumed 35 million lives. Their children came of age in the Great Depression, followed by six years of war in which another 60 million died. Their own children, the Baby Boomers, were without question a pampered generation, yet even they lived through long stretches of high unemployment and deep economic uncertainty. The oil shock of the 1970s ushered in a decade of stagflation — high inflation accompanied by stagnant growth and high unemployment — that made decent jobs no easier to nail down than they are today. The 20 years since the end of the 1980s has been a cycle of boom and bust that has seen millions of people lose homes, careers and life savings they spent decades building, often watching them vanish overnight through circumstances far beyond their control.

The notion that there was a time when anyone could coast through high school and land a nice secure career with minimal effort is sheer fantasy. Yes, a university degree carried more weight, because there were fewer of them, but that same scarcity limited the advantage to a relatively small group. The majority scratched out positions in competition with one another just as they do today. There was never, in my recollection, a bull market in sociologists, psych specialists or arts majors. A BA didn’t help you sell anything, build anything or invent anything. Entrepreneurs and self-starters never needed a university degree, and they don’t now.

[. . .]

If the 1960s and 1970s was a golden age of easy work and high pay, I missed it. If people skipped from school directly into secure jobs, happy families and a home of their own, it’s news to me. The challenges faced by youth are daunting, but no more daunting than they ever were. If Montreal’s graduates have been deprived of anything, it would appear to be lessons in history. Because they seem to have no clue how much tougher they’d have had it in almost any earlier generation they would care to choose.

Kelly McParland, “Quebec students are big on delusion, short on history”, National Post, 2012-05-31

May 19, 2012

Mark Steyn on “The Great Baracksby”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

In his weekly Orange County Register column:

It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:

“Geography is about maps

But Biography is about chaps.”

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author:

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007:

“He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”

[. . .]

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake — an elite schooling — Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure — the impoverished roots — merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives — the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi — are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

May 12, 2012

Rex Murphy on “Fauxcohontas”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

In the National Post, Rex Murphy outlines the ridiculous situation Elizabeth Warren has created for herself:

When is a politician toast — done-on-both-sides, pass-the-butter-and-jam toast? Well, one hint might be when you show up on blogs and in newspapers photoshopped as the Lone Ranger’s great Indian sidekick Tonto. Another might be when thousands of people spend hours making up sarcastic names for you, such as “Fauxcohontas,” or more brutally, “Dances with Lies.”

This is the unfortunate lot of Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat running for a senate seat in Ted Kennedy’s old district. During the course of the campaign it was revealed that Ms. Warren had listed her minority status in law school faculty directories, and that no less than the Harvard Crimson in 1998 declared in print that: “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.”

[. . .]

This bizarre comedy highlights the ugly absurdity that arises when people, or institutions, become so absorbed with the question of race that it eclipses their common sense. But what’s perhaps most telling is how all involved — the candidate herself, the faculties and administrations of various law schools, everyone — step back in pure shock, nay, horror, from the very notion that Elizabeth Warren may have been hired for any other reason than her professional qualifications. Race? Nothing to do with it. Minority hire? Never!

Everybody acting like affirmative action hires are something to be ashamed of and denied, something rudely pushed aside as unthinkable, is baffling. In every other context, affirmative action and its attendant policies and protocols are looked upon as the secular world’s highest forms of public virtue. Companies and institutions boast about their so-called equity policies and minority placements. Does not every university, in every hire, on every bulletin board, and in every online notice — spell out every so proudly that applications from minorities and special groups will be given “special” attention, or are specifically urged to hire. Does this not right historical wrongs? Is this not part of enriching the educational experience?

And yet, any suggestion that a particular individual may have benefitted from these wonders of our modern age is treated as a slap in the face to said individual. How can a policy be a triumph in enactment but an insult in execution?

Update: Even the 1/32 claim appears to be failing, as the claimed documentation does not seem to exist:

I reached out to Christopher Child, the well-known genealogist who was the source of the claim, and his employer, the prestigious New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), but they have gone silent, refusing to comment on, defend or correct their claim that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee. The e-mail exchange appears at the bottom of this post.

The fallout from Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Native American status threatens to drag down not only her campaign, but also the credibility one of the premier genealogical societies.

You know the background, as I have posted extensively about the Warren Cherokee saga. The media and various pundits have continued to assert that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee based on her great-great-great grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith.

I understand that the US has a law on the books to allow the prosecution of people who falsely claim to have won military medals — I think it’s something like the “stolen honour law” — is there anything similar for those who falsely claim minority status in order to benefit from legislation intended to aid members of minority groups? (Not that I think there should be such a law, but I’m just curious about whether such a thing is on the law books already.)

May 11, 2012

The University of Calgary is told by the courts that it “is not a Charter-free zone”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

The university attempted to suppress free speech by students and lost in court. And then lost on appeal:

This week, in the case of Pridgen v. University of Calgary, the Alberta Court of Appeal affirmed that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the free speech rights of university students on campus.

[. . .]

The University of Calgary prosecuted the 10 students who had joined the Facebook page, and found all of them guilty of “non-academic misconduct” — including students who had not posted any comments. The university accused the students of defaming Mitra with “unsubstantiated assertions,” yet refused to hear any evidence from the students about the professor. Nobody testified to deny that the professor had asserted, bizarrely, that Magna Carta was a document written “in the 1700s for native North American human rights purposes.”

The University of Calgary threatened the Pridgen brothers and the other eight students who’d joined the Facebook page with expulsion if they failed to write an abject letter of apology.

Having been found guilty of non-academic misconduct, Keith and Steven Pridgen took the university to court, which declared in 2010 that, “the university is not a Charter-free zone.” That judgment was upheld this week by the Court of Appeal.

While the ruling is a victory for the free-speech rights of university students, it is disheartening that the University of Calgary needs a court order to compel it to fulfill its own mission statement: To promote free inquiry and debate.

May 9, 2012

A call to ban college football

Filed under: Economics, Education, Football, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

This Wall Street Journal piece by Buzz Bissinger is guaranteed to stir up controversy:

In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

That’s because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today’s times.

[. . .]

Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of the University of Oklahoma who make obscene millions. The players themselves don’t benefit, exploited by a system in which they don’t receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn’t benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.

If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don’t—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs.

The other big beneficiaries of the college football system is, of course, the NFL. Unlike baseball or NHL teams, it doesn’t have to maintain a “farm team” league or leagues to provide training and play opportunities for would-be professional football players. This burden, instead, is carried by the taxpayer as part of their share of higher education.

May 5, 2012

The “Fauxcahontas” affair

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Mark Steyn on the controversy swirling around Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren over her on-again-off-again claim to having First Nations ancestry:

How does she know she’s a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather’s “high cheekbones,” and says the Indian stuff is part of her family “lore.” Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama Special Advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am,” and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as The Boston Herald reported, “Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the ’90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty’s lack of diversity.”

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School’s first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have – hang on, let me get out my calculator – duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams From My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

May 2, 2012

The real NCAA scandal is how they treat the student athletes

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Gregg Easterbrook’s annual post-draft column spends a bit of time excoriating the NCAA for its massively misplaced ethical priorities:

The draft had been in progress more than a day when the Sinners finally chose, having traded their first choice and lost their second in Sinnersgate. New Orleans’s first selection was Akiem Hicks, who played eight-game seasons at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, going there after the NCAA blackballed him for recruiting violations. Nakia Hogan of the New Orleans Times-Picayune describes the deeply shocking abuses of which Hicks was guilty:

“In 2009, Hicks transferred to LSU from Sacramento City Community College. … But Hicks was mired in a minor recruiting violation and never got to play at LSU. The school discovered potential violations associated with impermissible telephone calls to Hicks in the recruitment process, impermissible transportation before and after his arrival at LSU, impermissible housing and reduced-rent at an apartment complex in Baton Rouge in the three months before his enrollment at LSU, and the purchase of one meal by a football office student worker.”

Impermissible telephone calls! Three months of help with rent money! One free meal! Lock him up and throw away the key!

The description of Hicks’ blackballing sums up everything offensive about NCAA hypocrisy. Not only is it theater of the absurd that the NCAA punishes telephone calls. Not only do college kids always need help with the rent — if a kid from an upper-class family who was applying to LSU got trust fund money for his rent and meals, no one would blink. The real scandal is that the NCAA punishes phone calls but could not care less about graduation rates.

In the year Hicks tried to enter LSU, the federal graduation rate for the LSU football program was 42 percent, compared to 56 percent for the school as a whole. (Find any Division I sport program’s graduation statistics here.) The NCAA took no action on that.

College football players are creating hundreds of millions of dollars of value that goes to fund luxury living by coaches, college administrators and NCAA staff, but are not getting educations in return. Each passing day brings more evidence of the Taylor Branch “new plantation” analysis of big-college sports. As big-college coaches and NCAA administrators dine at four-star restaurants, one hungry kid gets one free meal — that must be punished! The horror, the horror!

May 1, 2012

Quebec’s student protest concentrated in certain departments

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

In the Winnipeg Free Press, Stefani Forster looks more closely at the composition of the Quebec college and university protest movement:

They are the 66 per cent. And they have been mostly invisible in the torrent of stories about Quebec’s student unrest.

Roughly two-thirds of Quebec students are not on a declared strike from their classrooms, are not necessarily participating in daily marches against tuition hikes, and not getting the attention of the national and international media.

What are they doing? They’re completing their semester on time.

At McGill University, classes and exams have been largely unaffected by the student unrest. Only three departments — Gender, Sexuality and Women’s studies; Graduate Art History; and French Literature — are on strike.

March 31, 2012

Nick Gillespie on the “bully” crisis that isn’t

Filed under: Education, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

There’s an ongoing major media story about bullies, but Nick Gillespie says the crisis doesn’t really exist:

“When I was younger,” a remarkably self-assured, soft-spoken 15-year-old kid named Aaron tells the camera, “I suffered from bullying because of my lips—as you can see, they’re kind of unusually large. So I would kind of get [called] ‘Fish Lips’—things like that a lot—and my glasses too, I got those at an early age. That contributed. And the fact that my last name is Cheese didn’t really help with the matter either. I would get [called] ‘Cheeseburger,’ ‘Cheese Guy’—things like that, that weren’t really very flattering. Just kind of making fun of my name—I’m a pretty sensitive kid, so I would have to fight back the tears when I was being called names.”

It’s hard not to be impressed with — and not to like — young Aaron Cheese. He is one of the kids featured in the new Cartoon Network special “Stop Bullying: Speak Up,” which premiered last week and is available online. I myself am a former geekish, bespectacled child whose lips were a bit too full, and my first name (as other kids quickly discovered) rhymes with two of the most-popular slang terms for male genitalia, so I also identified with Mr. Cheese. My younger years were filled with precisely the sort of schoolyard taunts that he recounts; they led ultimately to at least one fistfight and a lot of sour moods on my part.

Ah, yes, the joy of classmates discovering that “Nick” is such a useful name for casual abuse. It was part of the reason I’ve insisted on using “Nicholas” ever since I got into the working world. Bullies were certainly part of my early school experience, and that of my own son. Rather like the changing of the seasons, they were just part of the school environment. I got into a few fights, but quickly learned that most other boys had a weight and reach advantage over me that resulted in a fairly quick end to each fight. The bullying tapered off in high school, but I tried to minimize the opportunities for it to happen, too. I have very few remaining friends from school — but that’s partly a reflection of the fact that I had relatively few friends in school.

Part of the perceived problem with bullies is that parents are much more involved in their kids’ lives than earlier generations:

How did we get here? We live in an age of helicopter parents so pushy and overbearing that Colorado Springs banned its annual Easter-egg hunt on account of adults jumping the starter’s gun and scooping up treat-filled plastic eggs on behalf of their winsome kids. The Department of Education in New York City — once known as the town too tough for Al Capone — is seeking to ban such words as “dinosaurs,” “Halloween” and “dancing” from citywide tests on the grounds that they could “evoke unpleasant emotions in the students,” it was reported this week. (Leave aside for the moment that perhaps the whole point of tests is to “evoke unpleasant emotions.”)

Politicians, always eager to be seen to be “doing something”, are lining up to “do something” about bullying:

Last year, in response to the suicide of the 18-year-old gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, the state legislature passed “The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights.” The law is widely regarded as the nation’s toughest on these matters. It has been called both a “resounding success” by Steve Goldstein, head of the gay-rights group Garden State Equality, and a “bureaucratic nightmare” by James O’Neill, the interim school superintendent of the township of Roxbury. In Congress, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Rush Holt have introduced the federal Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called the Lautenberg-Holt proposal a threat to free speech because its “definition of harassment is vague, subjective and at odds with Supreme Court precedent.” Should it become law, it might well empower colleges to stop some instances of bullying, but it would also cause many of them to be sued for repressing speech. In New Jersey, a school anti-bullying coordinator told the Star-Ledger that “The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights” has “added a layer of paperwork that actually inhibits us” in dealing with problems. In surveying the effects of the law, the Star-Ledger reports that while it is “widely used and has helped some kids,” it has imposed costs of up to $80,000 per school district for training alone and uses about 200 hours per month of staff time in each district, with some educators saying that the additional effort is taking staff “away from things such as substance-abuse prevention and college and career counseling.”

Bullying is a problem, but it’s neither new nor growing:

But is bullying — which the stopbullying.gov website of the Department of Health and Human Services defines as “teasing,” “name-calling,” “taunting,” “leaving someone out on purpose,” “telling other children not to be friends with someone,” “spreading rumors about someone,” “hitting/kicking/pinching,” “spitting” and “making mean or rude hand gestures” — really a growing problem in America?

Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids. When it comes to school violence, the numbers are particularly encouraging. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, the percentage of students who reported “being afraid of attack or harm at school” declined to 4% from 12%. Over the same period, the victimization rate per 1,000 students declined fivefold.

March 28, 2012

Speaking of science, here’s a new development in “thermal cloaking”

Filed under: France, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Lewis Page at The Register walks us through the high points of a new development from France:

Top boffins in France have come up with a radical new take on the “cloaking” and invisible-shed physics breakthroughs of recent years. They have designed a technology which instead of bending microwaves or light can shield an object from heat — or concentrate heat upon it.

“Our key goal with this research was to control the way heat diffuses in a manner similar to those that have already been achieved for waves, such as light waves or sound waves,” says Sebastien Guenneau, of Aix-Marseille uni and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CRNS).

“Heat isn’t a wave — it simply diffuses from hot to cold regions,” Guenneau adds. “The mathematics and physics at play are much different.”

For now designed only in two dimensions, Guenneau and his colleagues’ approach involved shaping isotherms — lines showing density of heat flux transferring from point — so as to make heat travel around a given area rather than into it.

“We can design a cloak so that heat diffuses around an invisibility region, which is then protected from heat. Or we can force heat to concentrate in a small volume, which will then heat up very rapidly,” Guenneau says.

March 27, 2012

The Quebec student protests as a harbinger of the coming “entitlement wars”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Bill Morrison in the National Post:

This past week, the streets of Quebec have been full of marching students, displaying a degree of anger and solidarity the likes of which have not been seen in Canada for many years. The fact that this protest is focused on naked self-interest — maintaining the province’s ridiculously low tuition fees rather than world peace, global poverty or even the inchoate agenda of the Occupy movement — speaks volumes about the emergence in Canada of an inter-generational struggle over entitlements.

Everyone knows that a clash over entitlements is in the offing in Canada as a whole. It may come, as the political right argues, because government coffers are close to empty, and cutbacks have to be made. It may be, as the left suggests, that governments have been hijacked by low-tax, pro-corporation policies, and no longer care about equality and social safety nets. It even could be, as still others argue, that the public usage of our core institutions — hospitals, colleges and universities — has simply outstripped our capacity or willingness to pay.

As for the specific example of tuition, the simple fact is that university education is underpriced in Canada, particularly for the middle and upper classes that benefit from impressive tax savings along the route of getting their children to and through university. It is a much smaller subset of the total student body — children from low-income families — that deserves greater financial support and attention. Instead, and in a mix of self-interest and a commitment to equality, students demand the same concessions for all.

February 25, 2012

Tim Harford: The problem of “interdisciplinary problems”

Filed under: Economics, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Tim Harford recently visited Oxford Martin School to discuss the phenomenon of problems that are seen as intractable when viewed from within a “silo” or single discipline, but which yield solutions when approached in co-operation with multiple disciplines:

In academia, the challenge of encouraging interdisciplinary research is at least recognised as a problem. The advancing frontier of scientific knowledge forces most researchers to specialise in ever narrower fields and, as a result, collaboration between these silos is essential. I recently visited the Oxford Martin School, a seven-year-old initiative designed to foster cross-disciplinary projects at the University of Oxford. I talked to the school’s director, Ian Goldin, about the challenges of breaking down academic silos.

He thinks these silos are mostly artificial. Academic journals are largely specialised rather than interdisciplinary and official funding bodies shy away from interdisciplinary projects. The result is that academics with interdisciplinary interests have few ways to fund the research and few credible outlets for publishing the results. The Martin School has funding, but most of the researchers are either junior, with some freedom to experiment, or professors so senior they no longer need to worry about their publication record. The mid-career academics are missing. It is nice to hear the tenure system sometimes produces the hoped-for courage and independence, but not so nice that there is no career track for interdisciplinary researchers.

[. . .]

If problems are one focal point for collaboration, tools can be another. An example: systems needed to deal with the gigantic data sets generated in finance, astronomy and oceanography. Such tools naturally bring together computer scientists and the statisticians, economists and scientists who might use the data. Goldin points to “crowdsourcing” as a second example of a cross-disciplinary tool, complexity science as a third and (optimistically, I feel) practical ethics as a fourth.

Perhaps the real lesson is that promoting cross-disciplinary research need not require a mysterious blend of social-networking tools and funky collaborative architectural spaces. All that is sometimes required is a shared problem, or a shared set of tools, and, above all, the money to pay for the job to be done.

February 14, 2012

Envisioning the all-online university

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Megan McArdle on the recent announcement that MIT will be offering online programs (at lower cost than regular courses) and if this is a sign of the future (as it almost certainly is) what changes will occur in the realm of higher education:

I can see all sorts of factors that might combine to preserve the status quo, from signaling and status and networking, to the desire of college students for a four-year debt-financed semi-vacation. On the other hand, disruption never looks inevitable until it suddenly is — if you’d told someone in 1955 that GM was going to have its lunch eaten by some Japanese upstart, they would have laughed until the tears came. So it’s interesting and maybe even useful to contemplate what the college system would look like if this sort of distance learning becomes the norm.

1. Education will end up being dominated by a few huge incumbents. [. . .]

2. Online education will kill the liberal arts degree. [. . .]

3. Professors (course developers) will be selected for teaching instead of research brilliance. [. . .]

4. 95% of tenure-track professors will lose their jobs. [. . .]

5. The corollary of #4 is the end of universities as research centers. [. . .]

6. Young job-seekers will need new ways to signal diligence. [. . .]

7. The economics of graduate school will change substantially. [. . .]

8. Civil society will have to substitute for the intense friend networks that are built at college. [. . .]

9. The role of schooling in upward mobility will change. [. . .]

10. The young will have a much lower financial burden in their 20s. [. . .]

11. The tutoring industry will boom. [. . .]

12. If the credentials become valuable, cheating will be a problem. [. . .]

February 1, 2012

University tuition and lower-income student access

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Education — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:40

In the Globe and Mail (which seems to be having web authentication issues lately), Stephen Gordon points out that lowering university tuition costs won’t actually address the problem it’s supposed to:

There is a well-documented correlation between family income and university participation rates: people from the top quarter of the income distribution are roughly twice as likely to go to university as those from the bottom quarter. An implication of this imbalance is that the population of people who are attending university is far from being representative of the population as a whole: university students from the top quartile outnumber those from the bottom by a factor of 2 to 1. This imbalance is both the problem and the reason why the problem is so hard to solve.

Reducing tuition fees will do very little to close the gap between university participation rates in people from the higher and lower ends of the income distribution. The direct costs of university — tuition and books — account for only a quarter of the total costs (source), and financial considerations explain roughly 12 per cent of the gap between PSE participation rates of youths from upper- and lower-income households.

[. . .]

A far cheaper, more equitable and more effective way of increasing access to universities is to concentrate public funds on providing support to students in financial need (this group also includes those who have debt problems). But these measures would benefit only a minority of students who are already going to university, while tuition cuts would benefit all students.

Student lobby groups such as the CFS have a mandate to represent the interests of all current students, and this group does not include those who might have gone to university if more financial support were available. They have little interest in targeted programs — see, for example, the CFS’ reaction to the Ontario government’s tuition rebate for students from families earning less than $160,000/year.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress