Domain: insidehighered.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to insidehighered.com.
Comments · 96
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Re:That's a howlerYou ought to look into things before forming an opinion about them:
For-profit colleges had a 19.1 percent default rate, down from 21.8 percent last year.
Four-year public universities and private nonprofit institutions, meanwhile, had the lowest default rates -- 8.9 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively.
cite.
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Re:Oh the humanities!
They're more likely to your boss (or, more likely given your blinkered attitude, governing the welfare system you depend on) than waiting tables.
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Re:Overreacting
To understand, I suggest reading a couple of articles by Derald Wing Sue found on Psychology Today. They are " Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life and " Microaggressions: More than Just Race
." These two articles outline the modern concept of micro aggressions.One of the central tenets of the microaggression "theory" is that the intent behind the aggression is irrelevant. It is the how the act causes the recipient to feel. Thus, if you innocently make a joke about something to which I take offense, then it would be a microaggression. Though, presumably, one cannot be aggressive towards me because I am a white, straight male. (His concept is built upon the idea of Critical Race Theory. Within CRT, it's impossible for people to be racist towards whites because racism is viewed as a result of the structures and institutions built upon white supremacy. It also places more value on a person's experience than the facts surrounding the issue.)
This mode of thinking has become so poisonous that last year there was a sit-in to protest a professor at UCLA for correcting grammar along with other things. The argument advanced by the students was that he was correct grammar along ideological lines. Hence, it was a micro aggression.
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Re:No shit, Sherlock
university faculty really only does teaching on the side. Their main role is as researchers.
You'd like to think that wouldn't you?
The best available data, from 2003 (taken from the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty), show that full-time faculty members work 53.4 hours in a week. About 62 percent of that was teaching, including course preparation and advising, with 18 percent devoted to research and 20 percent to percent administrative and other tasks.
So "teaching on the side" seems to take up about three times as much time as research does.
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The market got us to the problem we face.
Letting the market handle things led to the situation we now face with DRM preventing people from making choices (highlighting how freedom of choice is so often a scam). This isn't the first instance of DRM providing no benefit to the user (eBook DRM leads to publishers and distributors taking away legally obtained copies of DRM'd eBooks like Amazon.com did in 2012 or making it possible to electronically enforce restrictions one could never get away with in paper books should the DRM proprietor so choose). The issue is not whether a proprietor has or hasn't used DRM to accomplish such a thing, the issue is that DRM grants someone or some organization the power to enforce restrictions like these, restrictions that should not exist. DefectiveByDesign.org doesn't seem to have problems coming up with plenty of other examples of how customers lose with DRM. DRM examples show us that word does not "get around pretty quickly" nor do monopolies "die a miserable death". Today there are people defending the idea of making it easier to get DRM into HTML5 instead of rejecting it out of hand based on principled opposition and experience. If things were as bad as you claim no business would bother with DRM, DRM would be rejected out of hand.
I think this situation is much better understood by looking at this in terms of a minimum acceptable interoperability; something akin to environmental law (recognizing one can't negotiate everything they need on their own so we need to work together to set acceptable standards that let us get what we need) instead of a transactional basis (one-on-one interactions where each user is on their own to negotiate a better arrangement where it's likely no one user can muster the resources to effectively challenge the proprietor). Owner's rights should enter here as well: one should be able to use whatever they want with their Keurig device including less expensive beverage pods than what Keurig sells.
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Re:Seems reasonable
If they don't go back to Russia, what penalty can they suffer?
Okay, look, here's how it really works. (I have many many Russian colleagues.)
Many Russians are very good artists and scientists and... they're awesome in lots of things, okay? (Well, they've got a pretty big population, so it stands to reason that there would be many talented people.) And often they go abroad for college, as many people do, only to find that jobs pay massively better anywhere else. Consider academics -- adjusted for cost of living, a top of the line Russian professor earns about 1/5th! that of an entry level academic in the US. Therefore, they tend to stay outside of Russia when they're done with their studies. But they have family in Russia, so they visit often.
That is what this plays off of -- they do go back to Russia. They don't emigrate completely. Heck, they like having the Russian passport. Therefore, you have this thing on your record, you have to come back for work, or you don't get to see your family. Now, from the point of view of most Russians living elsewhere, coming back to Moscow or St. Petersburg or wherever, it's great to be a tourist, but day to day life is just too hard. There have been some efforts to fix this, such as SkolTech, where the Russian government basically did what the Saudis did a few years ago with KAUST -- they saw that their university structure was in shambles, didn't know how to fix the whole country, so sent a ton of money at one place, and hoped it would make a difference. This is the same sort of effort... time will tell if it helps.
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Re:TFS seems confused...
Particularly for the scientists and other less-likely-to-be-salary-motivated types
I'm not sure that you understand the amount of variation between countries. The US pays about twice as much as France does for academics, for example. Maybe when you're earning 6 figures a doubling doesn't sound like so much anymore, but for someone that works for a university, it is a hard thing to ignore.
Have some data. You can be the worst in your field in Canada and live nearly as well as an Israeli professor who's the best in the world.
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Re:Shouldn't I have choices???I re-read the article and found that it is reporting another article. So, yes indeed, it is required
.. no choice. They worked with Apple (no conflict there).
More specifically ...Beginning in fall 2013, all incoming students will be required to purchase an iPad mini, which will come loaded with the student’s summer reading and core curriculum texts, created by Lynn faculty.
So it's not all the textbooks, just the core curriculum that Lynn has created. $475 is just the starting point and the iPad may not be useful for other classwork.
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Re:But I'm a democrat..
The United States doesn't really have a left-wing party.
That is a mistaken idea commonly held by people without a strong understanding of the American political system and politics. The US does in fact have a full political spectrum from left to right, including real, honest to Lenin and Marx Communists , and Communist Party. (More than one, actually.) It even includes people who have been willing to go the Stalin or Pol Pot route (see below after reading the rest of this). The difference is that people in the United States generally won't vote for Communists if they understand that is who is running for office. That is why many on the hard left camouflage themselves by rhetorically moving to the center and refer to themselves as progressives, or some other label, to merge into the larger body of the moderate left. If they make it into government, they are forced to govern by incrementalism using ordinary political means since they gain office by votes, not by revolution.
"I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy. There can be no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so."
Who is BILL AYERS? (This page has link to download the Prarie Fire political manifesto referenced below.)
William Ayers says Weather Underground, Boston bombings not same
William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire
We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. . . .
...We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build a new society.
And more....
The Weather Underground openly discussed exterminating 25 million Americans who refused to be "re-educated" into communism...
... I bought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. We, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250 million people.
And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.
The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them... how things were going to be.
I asked, well, what's going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 2
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academic adrift the old education system needs cha
academic adrift http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much the old education system needs change.
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what about people who alternative-credentials are
what about people who alternative-credentials are a better fit then the old College system. College is to much of a one size fit's all and its turning out people with big skills gaps. I not talking about Repetitive, simple jobs
Plumbers don't set in the class room for 4+ years before starting to work. No They do a trades / tech school with apprenticeship.
And CS is not IT and it's to much theory geared to programming and not the other BIG parts of tech / IT.
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Re:they seem to go crazy
Average full professor salary at Harvard is different than "average faculty salary."
The source for your article says that real average salaries for full professors (the top of the pay-scale, to which you can be promoted after being tenured from an assistant professor to an associate professor, so typically 10-15 years at your school) is $118K, if you are at a PhD-granting institution. Average salary for "college professor," with all ranks and grades of institutes in the US is $63K per year, because there are a lot more community college/baccalaureate-only schools than there are masters and doctorate schools.
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in IT we need to look past degrees and go to a dif
in IT we need to look past degrees and go to a differnt system.
maybe a apprenticeship system or a mixed class room / real work plan
may a GED like system as well.
"I recently wrote about the possibility of testing and certification for what I called a "college-level GED." Like the current GED test for high school equivalency, it would award certification to bright, hardworking job applicants who want to show potential employers how much they know, even though they never graduated from college."
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Re:DRM on Text Books?The *really* interesting bit? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pouring money into Open Textbook projects.
This makes sense in my opinion- the total cost for writing a series of 100 and 200 level texts to cover pretty much the entire curriculum is peanuts for something the size of the Gates Foundation, but it could really have a massive impact on the costs of education- check out how much books are vs. tuition at many community colleges.
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Re:Tuition
Professors are not allowed to collect royalties for books sold at the same college where they teach.
As an academic librarian, I can say with absolute certainty that this is only true at a handful of universities, and is nearly impossible to enforce.
And often not the best idea - sometimes the book that the professor wrote is the best book (why would he write it if he didn't feel that it was the best?).
In one class where the professor wrote the book, he told the class to buy a used older edition if possible since the updates in the latest edition were minor, and when he handed out assignments, he gave page numbers for both the new and old edition. And he handed out photocopies of a new diagram that weren't present in the old edition.
No professor is going to get rich off the royalties by selling to his students. If he wanted to make money from his students, instead of publishing a book, he'd keep it private and print copies for his class and sell them for $50/copy (keeping all of the profit) instead of the publisher selling it for $150 and giving the professor $5/copy in royalties.
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Re:Tuition
Professors are not allowed to collect royalties for books sold at the same college where they teach.
As an academic librarian, I can say with absolute certainty that this is only true at a handful of universities, and is nearly impossible to enforce.
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Re:Perfection in the eye of the beholder.
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Re:Hyperbolic blog posting
Follow the links to a more balanced story.
A lot of people like to complain about changes to Slashdot's interface or Slashdot's long lead time before posting breaking news and point to them as the end of the site. They're wrong, and while the interface may sometimes go through phases where only a few web browsers work well with it, these aren't even serious threats to the quality of the site.
However, I think that the trend of posting stories based on tiny, screwy blog posts when there's a comprehensive primary source just a click away really does detract from the quality here. I know this isn't new, but I think it really is getting worse. Some story submitters very consistently point to a small set of terrible blogs that benefit from the traffic but offer terrible accounts of the real story.
I think that we need more editing done between story submission and publishing to the front page and a commitment to at least have a single editor spend 5 minutes looking at TFA and when appropriate adding a direct link to a real source.
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Hyperbolic blog posting
Follow the links to a more balanced story.
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The link is a tiny little blog post.
Here is some actual coverage.
Anyway. There's no doubt that a lot of courses can be taught effectively online. There's also no doubt, for anyone who's ever done any real teaching, that once the subject matter gets the least bit advanced, there's a sharp limit to how much you can learn in an online course. Introductory "101" courses, which are mostly taught in giant lecture halls anyway, can probably go online with no ill effect on the students. Once you get beyond that level, most people need face-to-face interaction to really understand the subject.
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Online vs. Offline = False Dichotomy
The original question is a false dichotomy; the question isn't whether or not college should go online or not. The question is under what circumstances is the application of information technology and integration of online access and collaboration to the university education process appropriate and to what degree?
I am the Moodle Coordinator for the University of the People, a completely online tuition-free university. We have students from 119 countries learning in a collaborative fashion through online discussion forums, downloadable resources, and assignments including peer-assessed work and online quizzes, exams, and projects.
The mission of the university is to provide "universal access to quality, online post-secondary education to qualified students". Without the online component (through the open-source Moodle LMS), the university could not hope to fulfill this mission without charging a large tution and pricing most of the world's population out of the market. All coursework is online, and from my own perusal of the course materials, I find the curriculum to be challenging.
While this model will not and should not completely replace the traditional university, it is a viable model for providing a quality education, particularly to those who would not otherwise have the opportunity for financial or other reasons. For example, the university has a number of students from Haiti who, due to the 2010 earthquake, would have no other options.
I agree with several other posters who state that there is something to be gained from the interaction with professors, students, and others in the university community. That, of course, does not preclude posting resources online, creating discussion forums, and having students collaborate through the Internet. As an undergraduate (at Penn State) I had several undergraduate courses with 300+ students - my largest had over 1000. The professors in these courses mostly lectured; why couldn't the lecture be posted online and the quizzes, exams, and papers be submitted online? Not to mention there were students who did not attend class, but rather purchased the notes from one of the note-taking companies on campus. What's the difference?
A strong argument could easily be made that the blended approach is best; the workplace is increasingly becoming more diffuse and more and more collaboration is done between remote locations; in my case I live in Japan and collaborate with my university colleagues in the US and Israel and with intructors and students from around the world. The modern university education needs to adapt to and reflect this reality.
On a side note, it would be great if more world-class unveristies and colleges put their coursework online for all to see like MIT is doing with its OpenCourseware project.
The statements above reflect my own personal opinions; I do not speak for or represent the University of the People in any way, shape, or form.
For those of you interested, here is more information on the University of the People.
Wikipedia
Inside Higher Ed -
Re:dunno
If one write's one's own research paper, there is no need to check for plagiarism.
True. Unfortunately, if one's school uses Turnitin or a similar service, there is a need to check that one's original work will not be flagged for plagiarism, since the software they use is well known for producing an absurdly high rate of false positives. (Here is one reference out of many; Turnitin's steadfast refusal to discuss their algorithms in any other than vague PR terms doesn't help inspire confidence that anything's improved in the last couple of years.) Given the dire consequences of being accused of plagiarism in an academic setting, it's entirely reasonable for students to take steps to defend themselves.
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Re:This happens a lot
Not so much in the US.
In the US it's illegal for a for-profit company to accept donations and it's illegal to pay someone less than minimum wage.
So, the unpaid internships (at least the legal ones) are only in the non-profit sector.
Actually that's not true. But as the second article linked to in the story The Great Intern Debate points out, internships at private businesses must satisfy six criteria (all of which are broad enough that they can be made to fit almost anywhere). There are many private for-profit businesses that have interns, and the number keeps growing.
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Re:Does it matter
I was going to make the point that that study fails to mention how many engineers drop out of their programs in general; looks like someone else already did that research, however:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/05/engineer
http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/jee/award-winning-jee-papers/2008-wickenden-award-winner.pdf
Notice that they found that women persist in engineering at the same rate as men. The fact that most women leave engineering in a particular time frame is largely irrelevant, since most men also leave engineering in that same time frame.
If women are hearing snide remarks, it is apparently having less of an effect on their willingness to remain engineers than you might think. Both studies seem to support what I said from the outset: the problems are mainly before college, when high school students are deciding what programs they wish to apply to. The more recent study also indicates that efforts to encourage students to persist in general (rather than programs that focus on women specifically) tend to reduce the rates of women dropping out by a greater amount than the rate of men dropping out. -
Re:Didn't the US start off as the good guys?
When we found out someone already lived here.
A positively Churchillian response.....
Ward Churchill, to be specific. If we are going to have that, then we should have some Horowitz.
It will probably come as a surprise to many people, both friend and foe alike, that I am opposed to any attempt to fire Ward Churchill for the essay (now part of a book) that has become notorious in which he denounces his own country as a genocidal empire, supports America's terrorist enemies, and says that 9/11 was a case of the "chickens coming home to roost."
We live in country whose cornerstone document is a Bill of Rights that guarantees Americans a right to make fools of themselves if they so desire. State institutions like the University of Colorado are forbidden by our Constitution from firing people for expressing opinions, however offensive, idiotic or evil (and Churchill's comments on 9/11 qualify as all three). If, on the other hand, as some have charged, Churchill is not really a Native American as he claims, then of course he should be fired for fraud.
Yes, Churchill is a self-declared ally of our enemies in the terrorist war against us. But so are many academic leftists, including those now rallying to his defense. A decent university system with serious academic standards would probably not have hired Churchill in the first place, let alone promoted him to a position of responsibility and honor as the chair of the Ethnic Studies Department. But that does not give the regents of the university the right to fire him because he has embarrassed them now.
The real question is why wasn't anybody embarrassed before? In 1998, to cite one example, Churchill published a book - Pacificism as Pathology - which was essentially an argument for violent revolution to overthrow America's democracy. It was dedicated to an American terrorist who blew herself up while making a bomb intended to kill Army recruits and their dates at a social dance at Fort Dix. Why weren't any of his colleagues or superiors upset about this?
Churchill is most widely known, in fact, for his academic writings in defense of the Black Panthers, a leftist gang that murdered a dozen people, and for his academic treatises accusing America of plotting and carrying out genocide against minorities throughout its history.
Those who marvel at the current spectacle should keep in mind the fact that there is absolutely nothing new here, nothing that has not been not publicly known for years. The offending essay itself was published three years ago. No, whatever sin he has committed has not only been a matter of public record for more than 30 years, it has been reviewed over and over by duly constituted academic authorities at CU. The opinions that have suddenly catapulted this professor into the limelight have been examined and applauded by his university professors, the search-and-hiring committees that put him on the faculty of CU-Boulder, the promotion-and-tenure committees that made him a full professor, and the department that elected him chair.
In sum, Churchill's views, which are both hateful and ignorant, represent the views a substantial segment of the academic community at Boulder and on campuses generally. Robert Jensen, a leftist professor at the University of Texas whom I have debated on TV over the Churchill matter, fully shares Churchill's views that America should lose the war on terror and that the terrorists are in fact "resistance" fighters opposing the American empire. A well-known required text for "Peace Studies" programs authored by two professors at well-known universities teaches students that the word "terrorist" describes the American Founders, that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" and that America is the world's "most terrorist state." Churchill's new book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which contains his offending essay, is up for a Gustavus Myers Awar
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Re:College is a choice...
Read an article about teaching in Iraq - how different it is from teaching in USA.
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/12/20/owens -
Re:Been waiting for this
You're going to need a cite on this federal law or I call BS. Googling "iPad Kindle ADA" turned up zilch.
---linuxrocks123
I am trying not to let my opinion of the typical Linux/Android Geek be affected by your post. I know better. Most are as sharp as tacks!
"Driving Home the Point on Accessibility
June 30, 2010The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice on Tuesday released an open letter to colleges expressing concern that some institutions might be “using electronic book readers that are not accessible to students who are blind or have low vision” and warning them that the government will crack down on any institutions that are “requiring” disabled students to use emerging technology that does not comply with federal accessibility laws."
And a bunch more at hundreds of links like this one that I copied only the first paragraph from.
You really should read the whole thing!http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/30/kindle
Did I notice the word Kindle in that URL, wow!
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Re:Awareness is the best result.
If you want everyone to understand Moby Dick, you're going to have to make it a picture book. If you don't, you're an elitist.
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Re:Slashkos
The problem with the system in America is that it is designed to kick people when they are already down and then hold them there. People of all races and upbringings make mistakes. The American system is much more unforgiving to those who get caught making mistakes.
This, for example, and ridiculous bank overdraft fee policies among others.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Much more unforgiving than what? My understanding is that in England, most of the time if you are born in the "working class", your children will die as part of the "working class". If you look at U.S. statistics, you discover that most of the people in the bottom quarter of wealth in the population ten years ago, aren't in the bottom quarter today.
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Re:Slashkos
The problem with the system in America is that it is designed to kick people when they are already down and then hold them there. People of all races and upbringings make mistakes. The American system is much more unforgiving to those who get caught making mistakes.
This, for example, and ridiculous bank overdraft fee policies among others.
-- Ethanol-fueled
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Re:Medical research
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized.
Fortunately the NIH public access policy is doing a lot to reverse this trend, but unsuprisingly, it's meeting with a lot of resistance. Mostly from the publishers, not the drug companies, but that's a matter of whose ox is being gored. If the FDA ever gets serious about its threats to open up clinical trial data, you'll see a real brawl.
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Re:So?
You just have to lie.
And to generate a controversy on slashdot, you just have to lie in the article summary.
Look, I have no doubt that all kinds of universities do all kinds of crazy things to influence their rankings. But the summary gets a lot of stuff wrong.
For example, on the faculty salaries... Apparently, Clemson did two things. Firstly, they raised actual salaries, which would have a real and legitimate impact on their ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty. Second, they corrected a previous under-reporting of compensation. US News bases its formula on total compensation (which combines salary and benefits), and apparently Clemson had been previously only reporting salary. (Here's the money quote: "Clarifying Clemson's approach after the panel for a reporter and an interested Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News's college rankings, Watt said that the university had added benefits to its faculty salary reporting to U.S. News after previously having failed to do so, as the magazine requires. So its jump came not from double counting or including information that it should not have, but from playing catchup." [source]
On class sizes, the way Clemson "manipulated" the data was by... um, actually changing their actual class sizes. They made their smaller classes smaller and let their bigger classes get bigger, because US News uses thresholds of 50 in evaluating class size. Sure that helps their numbers... but it's also not a bad thing from a pedagogical point of view. With a discussion-oriented seminar, reducing below 20 makes a real difference. And with a big lecture, 55 versus 100 is not that much of a difference. So they might have actually improved their delivery of education.
As for the fake applicants mentioned in the summary, I couldn't find that in any of the linked articles. But one of the articles said that Clemson tightened their actual admissions standards (i.e., required higher high school class ranks and SAT scores). That isn't manipulation, that's objectively becoming a more selective institution.
The dirtiest accusation is that in the peer rankings, Clemson deliberately gave low scores to close rivals. If that was really done intentionally (which Clemson denies), that is genuinely dirty, but not terribly shocking. And that kind of a pattern should have been easily detectable by US News, if they had bothered to look for it.
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Re:Links should be permanent
The problem there is this only works if one controls the _entire_ URL.
I had pages on AOL's FTP/webspace since its inception through AOL's ``sunsetting'' those services --- unfortunately, I published a number of papers which had links to http://members.aol.com/willadams so all the printed copies are out of date since there's no way to update them to http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/
It's this sort of thing which makes the MLA's decision to omit hard-coded URLs from their references....
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/11/mla
But that's ignoring the problem.
William
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Re:Troll? Really?
1) Don't forget: the vast majority of college professors are unabashed liberals, if not outright socialists. There are plenty of conservative professors, they just don't fit into the Jesus and Shotgun ethic that drives the GOP today. When you decide to take an anti-intellectual approach to politics you're going to, surprise, lose the intellectuals.
Really? There are plenty of conservative professor? According to this article http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics 9.2% of college professors are conservative vs, 44.1% of college professors are liberals. I have seen this in several other articles. Can you provide any reference to support your claim?
How about from your reference:
The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided on affirmative action in college admissions.
It would seem that professors, while possibly more liberal than the general population, have views that cut across teh spectrum and may be liberal in some areas and conservative in others.
That is not unusual in even the general population. The "Southern Democrat" for example, socially liberal but economically conservative.
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Re:Troll? Really?
1) Don't forget: the vast majority of college professors are unabashed liberals, if not outright socialists. There are plenty of conservative professors, they just don't fit into the Jesus and Shotgun ethic that drives the GOP today. When you decide to take an anti-intellectual approach to politics you're going to, surprise, lose the intellectuals.
Really? There are plenty of conservative professor?
According to this article http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics 9.2% of college professors are conservative vs, 44.1% of college professors are liberals. I have seen this in several other articles.
Can you provide any reference to support your claim? -
Re:If this is true...
The point I'm making here, in an admittedly roundabout way, is that sports actually tend to pull in a decent amount of money, so that the funding usually isn't that major.
Actually, I've read that this isn't actually the case; that while a small number of schools have very successful (and well known) sports programs that do pull in a profit, the majority of colleges do in fact lose money on their sports programs, at least for Division 1-A schools.
The amount of money require to field a top tier competitive team - scholarships, coaching salaries, stadiums and facitilies - can reach into the tens of millions (especially for football). Only a few schools have the draw to recoup enough to make up for it.
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Re:kolidge
Some of the most exciting science and math discoveries were made because people had trained themselves to think outside the box. That's what studying the liberal arts does for you.
For a few maybe.. but since you provide no cite or quantifiable evidence I'll have to say you're full of shit.
Bonus: Understanding liberal arts will help you get laid. That alone should be enough for the
/. crowd to line up for art appreciation classes.Try hitting the gym three or four times a week and taking up a sport. I slayed more poon in a week than most of my liberal arts wussy friends nailed in a year.
Oh yes, and here is the future of the so-called liberal arts. Fight for the crumbs, motherfuckers.
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Re:No, martime law is not enoughThere is plenty of criticism of US News rankings. Many contend that they are inaccurate and simply generate income for the magazine without providing useful information:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankoversy.htm
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/20/usnews
http://www.uas7.org/content/news/september_2007/uni_rankings_provoke_criticism/index_en.html
In the first paragraph of the UAS7 article,"Just recently the Princeton Review released its newest survey on the state of America's higher education institutes, proving a point many working in education have been trying to make for years: which colleges rank in the top tiers depends solely on the methodology the survey uses."
It all boils down to "Don't believe everything you read".
I have no interest in the University in question-- I'm just tired of seeing US News rankings quoted as gospel by so many people. -
Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA
Of course it won't. They flat out lied about everything else in their claims so why stop now. Hell even they have admitted certain numbers were fictional but that doesn't seem to stop them continuing to use them.
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Similar to...Note that this story is somewhat similar to a previous Slashdot item on "When 'Digital Natives' Go to the Library" (complete with the 'Digital Native' buzz-word that I have not seen used on other sites).
This quote included in TFA is, I think, the best way to look at integrating new technologies with teaching:Good teachers are good with or without IT and students learn a great deal from them. Poor teachers are poor with or without IT and students learn little from them.
It's a truism that's pretty obvious, but bears repeating. In my opinion, technology can only enhance the teaching/learning experience, since good teachers will have the wisdom to deploy it carefully. Less skilled teachers will deploy it poorly (e.g. using it as a gimmick instead of an useful tool), but then again those are precisely the teachers that would be wasting student's time with other tools (chalkboards, textbooks, etc.).
This is not to say that there have not been "growing pains" with integrating technology into teaching. Certainly I've seen otherwise competent professors make mistakes with over-zealously deploying an immature teaching tool. But, overall, I think the unsurprising conclusion is that all these new technologies provide advantages to those who are smart enough to exploit them properly.
My general view is that rather than try to integrate specific technologies (which then become gimmick-like), it's best to simply make generic resources available to students and teachers (e.g. computer labs, Wi-Fi, laptop loaner programs, site-wide software licenses, etc.). When resources are available, students will inherently gravitate towards using them in the most useful ways. For example, rather than explicitly integrating a particular piece of tech into a course (a particular software package, forcing students to use an online message board, etc.), my inclination would be to make a bunch of avenues for learning available, and see which ones the students inherently use. -
Summary isn't completely accurateThe University of Ohio was putting a brave face on being #1 on the RIAA hit list, but it now appears they have caved in to RIAA intimidation.
While it's true that the RIAA/MPAA organizations are ultimately responsible for universities caving in to their legal intimidation tactics, the TFA forgets to mention the ultimate enforcer of their bullying ways: the whores in Congress. Remember the letterssent out at the beginning of this month by lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee to a list of universities that received the highest number of copyright infringement notices?The letter is the latest sign that members of Congress have locked arms with the entertainment industries to endorse a crackdown on student downloading of copyrighted material, which they argue is rife on campus networks. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property held a hearing in March at which lawmakers promised greater scrutiny if they did not see colleges get tougher on illegal downloaders. College officials sought both to show that they took the fight against copyright infringement seriously and to suggest that excessive intrusion could hamper the open dissemination of information that characterizes higher education.
Well, this the result of kowtowing to the ultimate RIAA bullyboy: Congress -
Inside Higher Education covered this
BLACKBOARD MAKES A PLEDGE
Under fire in patent dispute, software giant says it won't sue
open source providers. Has the company gone far enough to
satisfy its critics?
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/02/blackboa rd -
Re:First link is borked
Try this page.
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Then how can they be top in education market?
I'm a little skeptical of someone's numbers here. According to this article: http://www.macworld.co.uk/education/news/index.cf
m ?newsid=16335 Apple is #1 in European education market. According to this they're #2 in the US: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/25/macs HP is a distant 3rd with Sony trailing... and Gateway is supposed to be #1 for college aged kids? Something just doesn't add up here. In terms of total market share Apple is slightly below Gateway (which I guess includes eMachines, right?): http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/10/20061019104 418.shtml So maybe Gateway(eMachines) is the over whelming choice of the non-college bound college age kids? -
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori
Ok. Here's one. I don't know too much about insidehighered.com, but I doubt it's a front for the aryan brotherhood.
In summary (because this is /., so RTFA is right out. ;->), white female candidate was one of the finalists for a job. Employer's EOO ADDED a male african-american candidate to the finalist pool. White female came in second from the top[1], while african-american came in second from the bottom. University gave the job to the african-american "candidate". Here's a link [pdf, you've been warned] to the decision by the seventh circuit to allow the case to proceed. So does she sound like she qualifies as "one good man or woman"?
Then there is the case of University of California Regents v Bakke[2]. Where it was held that the UC system had discriminated against a white applicant by admitting lesser-qualified minority applicants. Yeah, that's academic reverse discrimination as opposed to employment. And it was back in the 70's so it's completely irrelevant... Except that the exact same issue came before SCOTUS again in 1996. Unless you think PBS is an angry blogger. There have been a host of similar decisions handed down over the last few years, btw.
In a more general way, this site [3] points out in #12, that "less than 2 percent of the 91,000 employment discrimination cases pending before the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission are reverse discrimination cases." Working on the assumption (because I'm too lazy to mine for the actual numbers :-P) that the number is between 1% and 2% (If it were under 1%, I would have expected the site to say so), it appears that there are between 910 and 1819 [less than 2%, after all ;->] reverse discrimination claims working thier way through the EEOC at the moment.
I don't really have a dog in the fight, and to the best of my knowledge have never been passed over for a job based on either my race or my gender. Nor do I know anyone IRL who has claimed to have been so discriminated against. But you asked for proof of "even one" example. While implying that such was a high burden. Btw, google is your friend.
A now await the flames and downmods. /me dons asbestos suit.
[1] I'm personally curious where #1 fits into all this, but that's another issue.
[2] I don't think that Findlaw counts as an angry blogger-especially as it is just the literal SCOTUS decision.
[3] Which appears to be dismissive of the idea of reverse discrimination, btw. -
Re:UC Berkeley won't give credit for thishttp://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/29/ucs
u it has lots of details and links of the UC Berkeley admissions policy, and the resulting lawsuit. There may be some more up-to-date info elsewhere. The key soundbite is probably this:At issue are the university's requirements for high school courses for those seeking admission to one of the system's campuses. Almost all students who are admitted to the university are evaluated based on test scores and grades in certain college preparatory classes. High schools submit course outlines for eligibility, which is based on standards adopted by the university.
Good.
According to Bird [who's suing], Christian schools in the last year have started to have courses rejected, making it next to impossible for their students to earn admission to the university system.
Cheers, Nick