Hilarious bit about what happens when students are made to memorize great poetical works and can recite them at will for life, even when drunk and wandering the streets in the dead of night. This post from Fielding at The Guardian makes me regret not keeping up the curious habit of learning poems by heart so one can pull them out at odd times throughout one’s life. My fifth-grade teacher made her students memorize a poem of their choice every week, and then recite the poem on Friday. I loathed every single Friday from September through June in 1985. The vomit wants to come back whenever I see a Shel Silverstein book.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Students have moaned and complained for decades about cafeteria fare. Shockingly, when Mrs. Obama and the Los Angeles School District massively revamped public school lunches in an effort to decrease obesity in America, the high school teens refused to eat black bean burgers and quinoa and demanded their nachos and strawberry milk back.

It turns out that healthy lunches are all well and good for small-scale sample tastings, but when massively produced for a large high school audience on a daily basis, the ew factor is upped considerably.

Whatever. Teenagers start the day angry. Trying to please them only makes them understand that you are their bitch. Also, they will immediately begin subversive activities, like bringing in Cheetos and Pepsi from the outside to ingest and to sell at a profit to their slower-on-the-uptake peers.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

What has risen 400% in 25 years? Not housing prices in San Francisco, but that’s an excellent guess. Nope, it’s college tuition. That one-liner factoid takes me out at the knees and makes me want to hurl.

Phenomenal amounts of money are spent, borrowed, and paid back over lifetimes for higher education. At some point, one hopes, the college students will become educated enough to figure out when the price of education is just too damned much.

Since that hasn’t happened yet, two professors were interviewed on NPR recently so they could explain WHY college costs so much. It turns out that any and all tuition payers (students, parents) are at the sticky bottom of any given school’s list of people to impress or keep happy. The violent rage I’m feeling makes me warm inside.

Economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University and Stephen Trachtenberg of George Washington University tell NPR host Neal Conan what in the hell is going on with college costs.

You can read listen to the story (30 min.) or you can read the transcript in its entirety here.

Excerpt from the transcript:

CONAN: I wanted to ask, you wrote an op-ed for CNN.com, “Why Does College Cost So Much,” you argued essentially that colleges have absolutely no incentive to reduce costs.

VEDDER: That’s right. Now, there are a few exceptions to that. The for-profit higher education sector is certainly a clear exception, but by and large, most colleges do not get rewards. The presidents of the universities, the senior officials, the key faculty do not get rewarded by being efficient, by teaching more students for the same amount of money or whatever, by using buildings efficiently, six, seven days a week, et cetera. There’s no incentive in that for them.
So there’s no great compulsion to reduce costs, and yet spending more money often has rewards. It can help improve your rankings in the magazine rankings that go on by magazines like US News or Forbes. And it is actually beneficial to colleges, or at least it’s perceived to be beneficial to colleges, to spend more money: nicer facilities for students so you attract more students, better students, whatever, lower teaching loads for faculty so that they’re happy and content and not likely to cause a lot of problems.
So the job of a university president is to raise a lot of money, tons of money, and distribute it, and not too much attention is placed on lowering the cost to the consumer.

CONAN: In fact you argue that the consumer, the student and then the student’s parents, but they come last in a list that includes, you mentioned the faculty, key faculty members are bribed with lower teaching loads. You mentioned alumni, who are in a sense are bribed to make donations to the school through successful sports programs and other things like that, and trustees.

VEDDER: Yes, I think that’s right. Remember, colleges and universities don’t have the profit motive that compels people in the traditional private sector to cut costs, be efficient, try to get more bang for the buck, as it were. So that is sort of lacking. It’s a nonprofit sector, and there’s a lot of third-party payments, that is government money and also private, philanthropic money, that comes into universities that reduces the need to depend utterly, solely on the consumer to foot the bills, to pay the freight, as it were.

Related Posts:

How To Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt
Watching America’s Higher Education Creams Go Down In Flames
College Tuition: Save Or Borrow?
Ways To Kick The Ass Of Student Loan Debt
International Students Bring $18.8 Billion To U.S. Economy
I Live In A Van Down By Duke University
College Or Gambling?
The Cost of College and the Three-Year Degree Option
Streamlined and Fuel-Efficient Three-Year Degrees
Economy Makes Being an RA Seem Like a Good Idea
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: new Stanford University library)

Tomorrow is the Nov. 5th SAT, which I can guarantee is freaking the crap right out of teenagers across the nation. Poor bastards. When I took the Rite of Passage for American High School Students (standardized tests written by pain-in-the-ass adults whose heads are shoved so far up their exit ramps that they can no longer navigate reality), I must say I had a rather cavalier attitude about the whole thing. Almost twelve years of public school had made me quite the badass standardized test taker; I was unconcerned.

Most students don’t have that attitude. To them I advise chilling the eff out, this is not the end of the world. I promise. Shite of a much higher magnitude will befall you in the course of your lifetime, I can guarantee it. So quit your whining and suck it up, kiddos. You walk right in there with your #2 pencils and kick some standardized ass! Or don’t, and head for your 5th choice school. No biggie.

Need some advice on SATs and ACTs and how they may affect your future matriculation plans? Allen Grove is a font of information about college admissions. Here are four of his bits of wisdom:

Low SAT or ACT Scores? These Colleges Don’t Require the Tests
What ACT Scores Do You Need to Get Into College?
Are My SAT Scores Good Enough?
Low ACT Scores? What Now?

Further Reading (my cranky attitude toward standardized tests in general):

Secret SAT Scores
Colbert’s Wickedly True Take on the SATs
Testing Season Begins
An Excellent Argument for Abolishing the SAT
The Newly Unfabulous SAT
Awesome Parent
The SAT Is Not Good
College Admissions Testing: For and Against
January 23rd SAT Results
Calculating Potential
Kaplan SAT Prep Tools on Facebook

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: panic)

Pamela Yellen over at the Huffington Post gives advice on How to Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt. I’ve read dozens of articles on this topic over the years and none have irked me and impressed me with their proposals and solutions the way Yellen’s article has.

Her main piece of advice is to flat out not head off to college at all “unless or until you can afford it.” Not the standard higher education version of the American Dream. Usually everyone’s telling young adults to do whatever they and their parents can in order to acquire a college diploma, regardless of how many decades beyond graduation both parties will be swimming in debt.

Whether you agree with her or not, it’s interesting stuff to think about:

Four Paths to a Debt-Free College Education
1. Save it first.
2. Postpone it.
3. Do it smarter.
4. Skip it altogether.

Further Reading:

Ways to Kick the Ass of Student Loan Debt
Number-Crunching the Effects of Student Loans
Adventures in Education: Paying for College
The Economy and Higher Education
No One Likes a Recession
Calculating Potential
Investing in Students’ Futures
Extremely Useful Guidance for the Newly Salaried
Fall 2011 Facebook App for Financial Aid
College Grads and Student Loan Debt
Arne Duncan: Direct Student Loans
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The unfortunate phenomenon of elementary-aged girls becoming interested in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) subjects, going off to college intending to major in and then pursue a career in one of those fields, and ultimately veering off somewhat sharply into less science-and-math rich majors and careers is common.

Fortunately, it has not gone unnoticed by the chicks who have gone on to work in their dream STEM fields, and several entities have started working to foster girls’ education and career paths in STEM subjects.

Michelle Obama, not a STEM girl herself (what with being a lawyer and all), is all for supporting girls in math and science and gave a little talk about it recently. My favorite bits from the transcript:

And if we’re going to out-innovate and out-educate the rest of the world, then we have to open doors to everyone. We can’t afford to leave anyone out. We need all hands on deck. And that means clearing hurdles for women and girls as they navigate careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

And it starts with lighting the spark for science and math in elementary school and grade school. We talk about this all the time. I know for me, I’m a lawyer because I was bad at these subjects. (Laughter.) All lawyers in the room, you know it’s true. We can’t add and subtract, so we argue. (Laughter.)

And so encouraging girls early not to lose heart in those fields, and encouraging them through high school is important. But it also means making sure that these young women can keep pursuing their dreams in college and beyond.

Further Reading:

Why So Few Women In Science, Technology, Engineering and Math?
Dual Academic Careers
First Lady Michelle Obama Speaks to the Dept. of Education

Posted by Alexa Harrington

They always make you take history in school. I’m more of a math and science girl and will always choose a good chemistry lab over a history lecture. However, having been expected to complete several history courses (for the well-rounding of me and my education), I did pick up on the patterns we humans cycle through as decades and centuries go past. The technology we create for ourselves, ostensibly to make our lives easier/better/faster, seems always to impact more than just the job it was created for. I’m talking about wheels and looms, satellites and cotton gins, not Silly Putty and Flowbees.

Dean Shareski over at Ideas and Thoughts wrote a piece about technology in education and whether or not its just a tool. We’re in the midst of that changing moment, the one some hardcore science geek college girl will have to learn about a few centuries hence.

Further Reading:

Literacy: We’ve Still Got It
Another New and Exciting Way to Be Driven Over the Edge by Technology
New Essay Writing Apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch
Implementing Different Tools
Launching the Emerging Media Major
“Don’t Teach Your Kids This Stuff. Please?”
The Future of Education
Digitizing Knowledge
21st Century Learners

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(technology)

The question thousands of high school and college students want to know the answer to: Does Marijuana Make You Stupid? Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex has the answer.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If you’re a decent soul who sees your fellow humans as basically good until they prove themselves otherwise, then by all means, stick around. And watch this quick video from My Fellow American[link]; it illustrates the point that being a Muslim doesn’t make you an evil asshole, being an evil asshole makes you an evil asshole.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

When you’re a fresh-faced newbie trying to make your way through this harsh and unkind world, it helps to have an older, wiser, more experienced hand to hold onto. Standing on the shoulders of giants makes the machete-hacking stumble through the jungle go a lot more smoothly.

Those giants are called mentors, and every chucklehead youngin’ like yourself wants one. The more awesome a mentor, the more sought out they are. This has the unfortunate effect of making them ignore most of the tweedle-dums who come begging for their priceless advice and knowledge. If you want to be mentored by the best, you’re going to have to be better than all the other chuckleheads at asking. Ramit Sethi has some advice for you.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(standing on the shoulders of giants)