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
Teacher Training Too Academic, Not Practical
November 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Much of the furor over how to fix local education systems has focused on teacher evaluation. How do we hold teachers accountable and reward them for student achievement? Should they be paid according to how well their students perform on standardized tests? And is it fair game to publish any metric that evaluates them that way — teacher names and all — in, say, the Los Angeles Times? The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education is floating another idea, one that looks not at how teachers are evaluated in the classroom, but the way they're taught before they get there. ... Read More
Enlightenment Islam?
October 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Goethe University in Frankfurt will offer courses this winter in Islamic theology, which might sound to some people like damning evidence of "Eurabia" creeping into Europe's higher institutions. But the new Islamic Studies program "will educate not just theologians and the next generation of religious academics, but also specialists in Islamic theology," says professor Ömer Özsoy, who heads the department. The program belongs to a new fashion: Europe educating its own imams. Experts have warned for years that Islamic religious leaders in Europe have been trained abroad, in Arabic or ... Read More
A Wary Eye on ‘Big Oil’ Funding Energy Research
October 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The public investment in energy research has declined rapidly from its historic high during America's last major spasm of national interest in the topic, following the Arab oil embargo in the late 1970s. Three decades ago, 18 percent of all federal R&D money went into energy. Today, amid what many scientists consider a more fundamental crisis, the U.S. government now spends 1.6 percent of its R&D budget on energy. As a result, universities that have long done much of that research increasingly turn to a different source of funding: corporations with deep pockets and a vested ... Read More
Testing College Applicants’ Wisdom, Common Sense
September 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
As a small boy he was ignored and passed over by his teachers — he scored poorly on IQ tests and was obviously going nowhere. Ever since, Robert Sternberg, the new provost and senior vice president of Oklahoma State University, former dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, former professor of psychology at Yale University and summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, has been on a mission: He doesn't want it to happen to anyone else. "In the 1950s, when I was growing up," Sternberg said in his new book, College Admissions for the 21st Century, "the elementary ... Read More
Cops and College: Do Police Need Book Smarts?
September 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Weighing in on a long-simmering dispute, a recent study for the Police Quarterly shows that officers with some college education are less likely to resort to force than those who never attend college. The study found no difference with respect to officer education when it came to arrests or searches of suspects. But it found that in encounters with crime suspects, officers with some college education or a four-year degree resorted to using force 56 percent of the time, while officers with no college education used force 68 percent of the time. "Force" included verbally threatening suspects, ... Read More
Across the Science Gap
August 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Beryl Lieff Benderly, in her longwinded, shortsighted analysis of "The Real Science Gap," (July-August 2010) errs in two regards. First, she assumes that entering faculty rank is the major goal of postgraduate research training, but because there are fewer positions than candidates for them, the students are doomed to extended postdoc drudgery. Academia is, however, neither the exclusive nor the optimal career path for research trainees. Many go into industry, e.g. high-tech or pharmaceutical where, given the steady importation of brains from abroad, the demand exceeds supply. Others go ... Read More
Should Uncle Sam Attend For-Profit Schools?
July 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The late-night infomercial time slot is typically reserved for products people later regret buying — ab rollers, Ginsu knife sets, bad classic-rock compilations. Higher education hardly seems to fit. The sector of the industry that advertises there, however — for-profit schools like University of Phoenix and DeVry — has been booming. The industry has tripled in size over the last decade. The University of Phoenix, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted, has an enrollment now bigger than the entire undergraduate population of the Big Ten. Critics, including officials in ... Read More
Great Expectations Create the Best Teen Scholars
July 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"Cut that cell phone umbilical cord, and push those kids out of the nest!" may be the zeitgeist message to parents of teenagers, but research shows the opposite: Kids do better when their parents stay involved with them during their teenage years and even throughout college. In his book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-parenting, Carl Honoré skewers parents with chapter headings such as "It's the Adults, Stupid" and "Leave those Kids Alone." "Leave them alone" is likewise Tom Hodgkinson's rallying cry in The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising ... Read More
