Big Brother is Watching

I can’t even write about this article because my eyes are stuck in disgusted eye-roll position. The Christian Science Monitor published a piece about spy cams (real-time cams) on college campuses that enable hyper moms and dads to keep an eye on their college kiddos.

The colleges view the spy cams as the parents wanting to “monitor an investment.” And they refer to the parents as “helicopter parents.” The rooftop cameras at most schools have been around for years, usually showing off a beautiful view of that particular campus, students walking through the quad between classes, etc. Those cameras are pretty innocuous. It’s the cameras at some schools that give website visitors full control over the cameras so they can zoom in on students and see what little Jimmy is up to that freak me out.

I’m aware that thus far (we hope) the cameras are showing public areas. Fine. I’m a mom, so I get it that mothers miss their kids. But I feel like my daughter’s day at pre-k is her damn day. She has to learn to swim her way through the school day and the social situations and the new experiences so she’ll be able to deal with reality someday when I’m not there. And when won’t I be there? I sure as hell hope I’ll be miles away and not watching her on a website when she’s away at college. I hope I’ll be letting her have her adventure and find her way without the bizarrely creepy feeling that her mom is watching every move she makes. I have the heebie jeebies so badly right now. I really think that parents need to learn to let go. I get it that the world is big and scary and that sometimes people go away and they don’t come back. But watching every move they make is perhaps not the best way to teach your kids to survive or to show them that you respect them and have some degree of confidence that they’ll be okay in the world without you.

Plus, kids aren’t stupid. They probably know damn well where all the cameras are, and I can guarantee they’ll only show you what they want you to see. Kids are smarter than a lot of parents give them credit for (especially the Big Brother ‘rents). Either let go of your kids or embrace the Orwellian lifestyle completely.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College

I can’t tell which is more skewed: my personal experience or the research study done by Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. The premise for the study is good: which transfer students fare better in their upper division courses, students who transferred from two-year (less selective) institutions or students who transferred from four-year (more selective) institutions? Here’s the article. According to the study, students who transferred from one four-year school into another tended to earn higher grades in their upper division coursework. Higher grades somehow ends up translating to earning more income later on when you’re out in the real world.

Oh, please let’s break this down. First of all, let me be Obvious Girl and point out that your college GPA probably won’t make or break your future earning potential. If you are a slacker when you were a young’un, you probably have time to change your ways and become a productive member of society, bent on making obscene piles of cash and crushing anyone who stands in your way. And if you kick much academic booty in college, then chances are pretty good that you’re just wired to go go go, and you’ll keep on going at full ass-kicking tilt until you burn out and decide to chuck it all and just go be some place quiet where you can chant naked with no interruptions. Or, once a slacker, always a slacker, and once an ass-kicker, always an ass-kicker. I myself was a slacker in high school and for my first semester away at college, and then I did a 180 and transformed into a high-strung over-achiever.

And for the love of all things holy, please let’s not forget that there are many people in the world who had stellar GPAs in college, but chose to go into a field that tends to reward its workers with Karma in lieu of cash. Teachers being the most obvious example.

As for two-year vs. four-year schools being better or worse at preparing their soon-to-transfer students for their ultimate undergraduate destination, my experience was this: the two community colleges I spent time matriculating through were excellent. I don’t know whether I was just lucky, or whether their close proximity to major universities positively affected their curricula. All I know is that every science and math course I took used the same text, covered the same chapters, and was irritatingly half-filled with students from, the nearby university (Univ. of Washington and UC Davis). When the students already matriculating at the four-year schools couldn’t get a particular pre-med course, they’d just take the same exact course at the two-year institution. And, no, not because they thought it would be easier. Because they had a better chance of getting an evening class, and because the class size was less than 500 and the instructors who taught the course were actual instructors (not over-worked and under paid TAs) and had actual office hours where they would actually answer your questions. Crazy, I know.

One last thing to keep in mind regarding the performance of transfer students from two-year schools being somewhat less than their four-year school counterparts. If a student starts out at a community college instead of jumping right into four-year college or university, there’s a good chance that money is a factor. By this I mean that they are probably working while attending school. I was fortunate (spoiled) and was able to skip off to Cal State right out of high school. (Then I changed my mind, wanted to transfer to the UC system, and was forced to spend a year in community college purgatory to prove that I really really wanted to attend UC Davis). I didn’t have to work during most of my college education (because my parents didn’t feed me and they dressed me like a dork so they could scrimp and save for my college fund, and for that I will be eternally grateful—now I have an education and character), so I’m lucky. But the two times I decided to switch schools and ended up using a community college as the proving ground (from Cal State Fresno to UC Davis) or a waiting room (while I waited for my Washington State residency status to kick in) I noted the predominance of out-of-their-damn-minds students who had to work and go to school. Which makes me think lower GPAs overall from the two-year transfer students has more to do with life and less to do with the quality of the education received at a community college.

Feel free to tell me if you’ve attended a two-year institution that was below par. I have nothing but good things to say about the coursework at Sacramento City College and North Seattle Community College. I was not happy with the red tape factor, nor was I pleased with the obvious Catch-22 state of affairs at Sac City (the dead man in Yossarian’s tent lives there, in the registrar’s office).

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College

As bizarre as it may sound, a recent New York Times article revealed that parents believe that a higher tuition at a university translates into a better education for their child.

Ursinus College in eastern Pennsylvania, realized this and a few years ago made a decision.

“…in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.

Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent, to 454 students. Applicants had apparently concluded that if the college cost more, it must be better.”

The same holds true, apparently, at many other schools around the country - including some brand name ones like Bryn Mawr and Rice University.

While increasing tuition, the universities also end up sweetening their aid packages. It all, essentially, works out to be the same. The originally price tag, though, suddenly looks more Louis Vuitton than Coach, or Jansport for that matter.

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Tuition|College Admissions

Colleges are sending out early decision letters this week. I have been hearing about big envelope / small envelope apprehension all week, from a group in line at Starbucks to the man on his phone at the gas station to the daily reports I get from my brother who is waiting nervously to hear from his college of choice. The stress is palpable, perhaps because it is so multi-layered. Not only is the mere fact of waiting for a letter maddening, but early decision acceptances or rejections are so intensely wrapped up in the mindset that there is one perfect college for every person that it is difficult not to see the result as a be-all, end-all. I’m hardly the first to say that I find this troubling—I certainly believe that there are colleges, and more specifically college types, that are well suited to particular people but it seems unreasonable to maintain that there is a one-to-one ratio between a person and his “perfect college”. And although it sounds moralistic and will hardly assuage anyone’s anxiety as they check their mailboxes, things really do work out just fine.

The summer after my junior year in high school, I decided that I wanted to go to Dartmouth. It made perfect sense. My older sister, who still incited sparks of childhood sibling idolization, went there, and I saw the concept of college through her eyes; to me, college simply meant Dartmouth. My sister had been accepted early and it all seemed so easy—and then the rest of her senior year seemed so fun. We were remarkably similar on paper, and I assumed that the cards would fall into place for me as well. These clearly aren’t the best reasons for someone to choose their early decision school, but realistically, there’s just not much for a high schooler to go on when trying to decide how they want to spend their next several years, regardless of the number of schools they visit or amount of admission material they dutifully memorize.

On December 15, 2001, I learned that my “fate” would, indeed, be different than that of my sister’s. I had been deferred, and I was as stunned as I was heartbroken. For whatever over-confident reason, I had simply expected to get in. My two best friends were also deferred, and we commiserated in the school hallways, tearfully telling friends and the teachers who had written our recommendations that our plans had been dashed. Though there were many reassuring words and pats on the back, one consolation remark was particularly memorable. As we told our calculus teacher the bad news, she gave us a bright smile and drawled in her born-and-raised-in-Texas drawl, “Aww girls, don’t ya’ll worry. You’ll find your husbands at another school.” Oh my god, how ridiculous. I’m actually STILL laughing about this one. (and am going to choose not to delve into my related diatribe about feminism and education here.)

But while she was totally off base with the husband card (I mean, really…), my nutty calculus teacher did predict the basic sentiment of the end of the story—we would easily find happiness at other schools. A few months and one particularly miserable application-filled winter break later, I got a couple of big envelopes, decided to go to Harvard, and now, 6 months after graduating, can’t fathom having gone anywhere else. Harvard became synonymous with home for me, regardless of the fact that I hadn’t pegged the school as “IT” when I was 17.

And while I adored Harvard for its resources, its course offerings, its dorm life, and its dining halls (oh man, I loved the dining hall)—all of the things that you read about in admissions brochures—the reason the school became my school was because it was where I built a community. As much as now I hate to admit it with all of my current school pride, I think that I could have built this type of community just about anywhere that fit a certain set of overarching criteria.

Obviously, getting into the college you want early is absolutely amazing, but rejection (or deferral) isn’t so disastrous. I can say this confidently because I’m not in the thick of it anymore, but if you can take the admissions process which even a tiny grain of salt, you may find that you, more than the school itself, will end up defining your college experience. And then you too can write reminiscing blogs with lots of “good advice”. Ha.

Posted by Julia Bonnheim
Colleges and Universities|Admissions

A college instructor was charged with trying to sell grades, CNN reported recently.

“A computer science lab instructor at a community college changed students’ grades for cash and wine and told a student to lie before a grand jury in an attempt to cover up his lucrative scheme, prosecutors said.”

The guilty party, Elvin Escado, is an instructor at LaGuardia Community College. Apparently, he had been collecting anywhere between $200 and $2,500 from students. In return, he would go into registrar records and provide students with a few quick boosts.

How sad - between this and the Columbia scandal, it has been a rough week for higher education.

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Ethics|Grades

Students at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism finished the semester in a cloud of confusion and suspicion. When a student reported that there had been cheating in some form on a take home exam in a Law & Ethics course, school officials probed further. What they found was that there was cheating, ironically in an ethics class, and in a program that only has Pass/Fail grades! As a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, I know that this is a field in which your clips and your portfolio are what matter. Grades? Nobody even asks.

So what inspired these students to cheat? What were they thinking? Columbia remains pretty mum, the instructor of the course, esteemed journalist and writer Samuel Freedman, refrained from commenting.

Nobody has been punished for cheating, and all students have been assigned a new exam question to remedy the situation. It’s a play on life:

“You are the executive editor of a newspaper,” begins Exam Essay Question III, forwarded to a reporter by a student. “You receive a tip from a credible source that one or more unspecified articles in recent editions of the newspaper contain fabricated material. No more details are given.” No one admits responsibility. What do you do?

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Cheating|Grades

Are online professor rating sites even useful?

I’ve been reading about these new “grade your professor” web sites (Pick-A-Prof and Rate my Professors) and, while I think the basic idea is good, I have mixed feelings about their ultimate usefulness.

When I was an undergrad at Harvard we had a nifty little (actually, it was kind of huge) book called the CUE Guide that included the results of the surveys given at the end of almost every course. Previous students rated the professors and the classes on everything from level of interest to workload to the professor’s speaking and teaching style. This was incredibly useful. Students would spend the weeks surrounding registration sitting in dining halls and libraries with their color-coded, cross-referenced copies of the Courses of Instruction and the CUE Guide splayed out around them, trying to balance their desire for a stimulating class with a manageable (read: easy) workload. And usually, the CUE Guide’s ratings were dead on—reliable, accurate, and honest.

This past year, however, the CUE Guide shifted its data collection system, which wreaked havoc on the otherwise excellent system. Instead of passing out surveys to students in class (the beloved day when class ended 20 minutes early…), thus creating a captive participant who had to complete the survey, the CUE went online and emailed students to request that they evaluate their classes. As the repeated—and increasingly frantic—emails soon proved, students just weren’t taking the surveys on their own time.

Skewed Data
What ended up happening is what I fear will happen on these “rate my professors” sites. The only students who really participated in the CUE surveys once they went online were the students who either absolutely loved or absolutely hated the class, skewing the data significantly. In one sense, it’s still better to get some general information about a professor than none at all, but I would also encourage users to be wary of the inherently self-selecting evaluators. (My favorite comment after the new CUE system went through was the level-headed, “Do not take this class if you like men, America, or capitalism.”)

Some other thoughts about the sites: Both Pick-A-Prof and Rate my Professors place an amazingly high emphasis on the professor’s grade history. I find this problematic for a number of reasons.

1. In most classes, TAs (who change frequently) will likely be giving out grades, not the professors themselves.

2. While everyone likes to get an A, an easy A by no means translates into a good class.

3. Taking a class that you know is historically graded easily has, in my experience, lead directly to slacking off which has led directly to getting the embarrassing B in the easy-A class.

Despite these many concerns, however, the more informed you are before choosing a class the better. And a great professor can easily make for a great class.

Posted by Julia Bonnheim
School | University | Professor

Clear Your Head

Regardless of who you are (student, parent, circus freak) and what you do all day, I think that by this point in the year, everyone is so overwhelmed with the things we have to get done that none of us knows where to start. I’m as smart and as organized as the next person, so I generally do fine keeping my To Do List in my noggin. I write down some stuff, but even with extreme sleep deprivation, I can somehow remember all the appointments and deadlines and phone calls and tasks and shopping lists and what needs to be organized, cleaned, dealt with, fixed, filed, put away, given away, or sold. This mental filing system works fine for several months at a stretch. And then, a few times a year, the number of items reaches some invisible threshold, and I’m no longer able to juggle it all using only my steel trap. I have so much stuff to get done that I don’t know where to start. And when I finally do some triage and settle on one task to accomplish, I can’t think straight because my head is too damn full of To Do List.

The only way to regain any semblance of control is for me to write down every last To Do on an actual pen-and-paper list. I’m sure there are deep psychological control issues involved, but it totally works to get the list out of my head and onto paper where I can see it, I can feel safe (issues, I know) that I haven’t forgotten anything, and I can have the physical satisfaction of crossing the done items out. It’s likely that most people these days put their To Do lists on their laptops. But I’m a pen-and-paper girl. My notebook is an actual book with bound pages and no keyboard. It’s medieval, I realize.

So if your School List or your Work List or your House List or your Life In General List has reached the magic threshold (universal physics are possibly involved) you can do what I do and make a list. Or you can take it even farther and read a book about how to organize your life. Or, you can choose the middle road and read this guy’s blog wherein he explains the basic concepts of “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” to you.

The basic idea is helpful for someone like me: you physically collect all To Do items in a box, either the item itself (photo album that needs organizing) or an index card with the item written down (“do research for paper” or “alphabetize cds the night before chem final instead of studying”) and deal with it all, one item at a time. It gets everything out of your head and makes actually dealing with it all much more manageable. Good luck.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College | Organization | Time Management