A year ago, Miller-McCune contributor Beryl Lieff Benderly's cover story, "The Real Science Gap," examined the discouraging reality in America of young scientists and the lack of job opportunities that they currently face. She argued that the myth that young, talented scientists don't exist anymore in America and instead suggests that promising career opportunities are dwindling and forcing them to choose a different path. Last week, the American Association of University Professors awarded Benderly its Iris Molotsky Award for Coverage in Higher Education prize. The award looks for ... Read More
State Budget Cuts Hurting Quality of Research
May 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
State budget cuts pose a significant threat to the quality of research in the United States, a panel of educators said earlier this month at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. While federal grants support 60 percent of university research, AAAS senior policy adviser Albert Teich said, America’s diverse and decentralized education system depends heavily on state funds as well. Two-thirds of U.S. universities with “very high research activity” are state-supported, according to the Carnegie Foundation. That in turn represents a big chunk of the total ... Read More
Encouragement Boosts Minority Student Success
May 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The achievement gap between black and white students has frustrated educators and policymakers alike for decades. Although the number of black students at American colleges has reached an all-time high, less than half of those students are expected to make it to graduation. Stanford psychologists Greg Walton and Geoff Cohen believe one way to help close the gap is to change the way students think about school. In a recently published paper in Science, they explain how an intervention lasting only one hour boosted the grades of minority students over three years and cut the racial ... Read More
College Costs Linked to Risky Teen Behavior
April 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Why do some teenagers engage in risky behavior such as drinking, drug use and multiple sex partners? Washington State University economist Ben Cowan has discovered a startlingly simple correlation that provides at least part of the answer. The more it costs to attend community college, the more likely it is that teens will act in self-destructive ways. “I find that lower college costs in teenagers’ states of residence raise their subjective expectations regarding college attendance and deter teenage substance use and sexual partnership,” Cowan writes in the Economics of Education ... Read More
Petroleum Engineering Shows U.S. Students’ Hidden Prowess
April 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
What Americans pay for gasoline gets lots of attention, but the price at the pump is only one oil industry indicator that has been rising lately. The starting salaries of bachelor's degree-holding petroleum engineers are also at historic highs. This other price spike has gotten almost no coverage even though labor market experts believe it seriously undermines the prevailing narrative about America's technical workforce. That narrative asserts that the nation has a shortage of scientists and engineers caused by inadequate school systems that can't produce enough excellent math, engineering ... Read More
‘State of Minds’ Puts Research in the Spotlight
April 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the pleasant aspects of being the editor of Miller-McCune is regular and often unexpected contact with people and entities that are working to improve the world by introducing some small piece of it to factual reality. Look, for just one instance, at the network of investigative reporting and transparency nonprofits — from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune to the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Public Integrity — that has grown in the last decade or so, and tell me your old daily paper used to do accountability journalism better. Another hopeful part of the media future ... Read More
How Did Students Become Academically Adrift?
March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Here's the situation. You're an assistant to the president at DynaTech, a firm that makes navigational equipment. Your boss is about to purchase a small SwiftAir 235 plane for company use when he hears there's been an accident involving one of them. You have the pertinent newspaper clippings, magazine articles, federal accident reports, performance graphs, company e-mails and specs and photos of the plane. Now, write a memo for your boss with your recommendation on the SwiftAir 235 purchase. Include your reasons for finding that the wing design on the plane is safe or not and your ... Read More
Derek Bok on Fixing College Failure
March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A longtime critic of higher education, Derek Bok is the author of six books on the ivory tower, most recently Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, published in 2005. Bok has an insider's view: He was president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and acting president from 2006 to 2007, the only person to serve twice in the job. During his first stint, Bok established what is now the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to help boost the quality of instruction at Harvard. Today, at 80, he is a research professor at the ... Read More
College Reversal?
January 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Some research has found that once Asian-American kids hit college, they no longer outstrip white students academically — if they’re living away from home. For example, a study of 452 students at UC Irvine led by University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva found that while both white and Asian-American students’ freshman year grades dipped below their 12th-grade GPAs, Asian-Americans’ fell dramatically, while white Americans’ dropped only slightly. “There’s a reversal of ethnic differences in college grades, at least temporarily,” Dmitrieva says. That reversal ... Read More
Affirmative Action Bans: Who Gets Hurt
January 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If the experience of California and Texas is any guide, this is what a state might expect if it bans the use of racial preferences in college admissions: Everyone who wants to go to college, including blacks and Latinos, will get into college – somewhere. But many more blacks and Latinos will be turned away from the best universities and left to “cascade down” to less selective four-year schools or two-year community colleges. Elite universities will become more white and Asian. In November, Arizona became the seventh state in the country to ban affirmative action in public higher ... Read More
