Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist

On finishing a PhD:

In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

Studying The Liberal Arts - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

True that:

Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols. We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process. That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths. It will even help you enjoy TV shows more.

The counter arguments that the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) are intrinsically more difficult and draw higher IQ students, or that the Liberal arts are easy to learn and study on your own, are both wrong. Most folks on the STEM side of things think they are better read than they actually are, because they don't know what they don't know about how to read deeply and critically. They don't understand the history, they don't understand culture, and they resist alternative world views.

The truth is STEM teaches you how to do things, and how to develop processes, but has nothing to say about the purpose or meaning of things. So you get a lot of glib rationalization and shallow reasoning. Linear, unimaginative fields for linear, unimaginative people whose only goal in life is to get a job and serve the powers that be. Basically, its the Dunning-Kruger effect and the military industrial complex that prop up STEM and under-value the Liberal arts.

You have to ask: how valued was theoretical physics in the world at large until the Manhattan Project proved you could kill lots of people with math?

Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar

Grammar is learned, not innate:

The project assumed that every adult native speaker of English would be able to understand the meaning of the sentence:

"The soldier was hit by the sailor."

Dr Dabrowska and research student James Street then tested a range of adults, some of whom were postgraduate students, and others who had left school at the age of 16. All participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier "every."

As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.

CSU now more affordable - The Denver Post

For incomes of $57,000 or less, tuition is half off.

kung fu grippe - My “old butcher” Arthur McA. Miller, Ph.D. ...

Merlin Mann remembers a favorite professor:

Handful of random Mac moments:

1. Told me a paragraph in a paper on Kurt Vonnegut was “curiously like whipping a dead mule with misplaced rhetoric”
2. Remarked to our terrified, slack-jawed poetry workshop that he thought one of the week’s less successful drafts didn’t actualy need an ending—”Because it might as well just keep going on forever!” This was not intended as a compliment.
3. Occasionally telegraphed his relative stress by lighting a new cigarette before the previous one was half-done. One day, in “Longpoems,” a third cigarette was lit. I feel confident no one in attendance ever forgot that day.
4. Once singled out one of my particularly shitty poems as one of the most peculiarly gruesome instances of “the pathetic fallacy” he’d ever encountered. “Would you mind demonstrating how you can tell when a goddamned rose thorn is ‘angry?’” I could not.

The Plummeting Line

Michael Berube on declines in the job market for English professors:

In more recent years, the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700.  This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250.  “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?”  It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace.  “That would be a Depression-era number,” I said, “because I don’t believe there’s been a time since the MLA started keeping stats when the number was below 1,000.”  Well, it’s now looking like 250 is indeed a very low estimate.  But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000, which is a problem, because all the MLA charts run from 1,000 to 2,000, so that 2009-10 might require the MLA to redesign the things or face the prospect of publishing one of those cartoon-charts where the plummeting line runs right off the page.

Palin's Edumacation

Ah, now I'm beginning to understand Sarah Palin a little better. She got the classic 80s middle-American underachiever's college education:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin attended five colleges in six years before graduating from the University of Idaho in 1987.

Now I want to see transcripts. How many of those schools did the beauty queen party her way out of?

Andrew Sullivan writes, "If she applied for an internship at National Review, they would turn her down."

Hire Education

The Wall Street Journal wants to keep you stupid by undermining higher education in the name of certifications for the masses and professional degrees (i.e. NO arts degrees) for the elite.

The problem with the B.A. and B.S. degrees we have today is not that the degrees are meaningless, it's that the dominant business culture doesn't value them. Any education that does not serve purely instrumental purposes is not seen as worthwhile. Let's not forget that the boom in higher education only got started during the Cold War when the powers that be decided we needed more scientists for the design of advanced weaponry like H-bombs and the like. The enthusiasm only cooled when they realized that science education also gives you unpleasant truths like evolution and global warming.

The author of the article also seems to be unaware that companies like Microsoft do have certification programs which is big business for them, but only creates an arms race between job seekers as more and higher certifications are needed to differentiate the talented from those who went to boot camp classes and took the test.

Professional trades also already have certifications, but that means that these people are also more expensive to hire which increases the incentive to hire non-certified unskilled labor instead.

So following the Journal's advice what you'll end up with is the same Ivy Leaguers in charge of everything and certifications for the rest of us poor stupid preterite losers.

Economics and Education

Harry from Crooked Timber and Megan McArdle are debating school vouchers. Harry puts the issue in plain terms:

Are people who buy houses on school-quality grounds necessarily hypocritical if they also oppose vouchers?

His answer, of course, is no. People can be well intentioned in their attempts to reform the poorest urban schools while still seeking the best education for their own families. But McArdle argues that the very fact that upper middle class parents pull their kids out of bad schools in favor of better suburban or private schools proves her point. As she notes in the first comment:

Ah ha! You may say. But pulling those kids out makes the system worse for those who remain. But if this is true, it is doubly true of pulling out your own, more privileged and high performing children, and taking away your own, more privileged and high performing, contribution as a parent to keeping the school performing at a high level.

I think the debate over school vouchers is tremendously weird, but that mostly has to do with the fact that I attended high quality suburban public schools, and my own kid is doing the same, and it never seemed like anything other than dumb luck. There wasn't a lot of angst or decision-making. You enroll and away you go. So I may be blinded to my own privileged status in life (oh, the irony).

The other thing is that the schools in our area have an open choice program. As long as there are seats available you can enroll or child in the school of your choice, even if it's not your neighborhood school. You can also cross district lines if you want to. Again, I may be lucky.

But to me the central issue in all of this is economics: schools with wealthy, high-achieving, highly educated parents do well. Schools that don't have these things inevitably fail. Otherwise there would be no point in moving to the suburbs because ALL public schools would be bad. But a truly good suburban public school is essentially equal to a private school, so it really isn't about tuition, it's about parents and their ability to pay for a better school or a better house or both. Vouchers attempt to remedy the tuition problem, but can't do anything to fix the larger social ills.

So if the voucher people were really serious, shouldn't they also favor:

• Vouchers for parents to help them move to the nicer suburbs. Subsidized mortgages. Telecommuting schemes. Public transportation improvements.
• Vouchers for schools in poor neighborhoods to recruit high-quality students and their parents from the suburbs and private schools. Promise free college prep and state championship sports programs.
  
• Vouchers for poor neighborhoods to subsidize a living wage and raise the overall standard of living to the equivalent of the suburbs. If household incomes were raised to say, $75,000 across the board, then even the most blighted urban school becomes the equivalent of a middle class suburb.
  

But of course the answer would be no. No one would support this sort of plan. The voucher people are not in favor of some kind of crackpot socialist scheme. They're not interested in a Great Society style re-engineering of the social order. What they want is the destruction of the public school system and the privatization of suburban public schools. They hate the teachers union because it gives teachers autonomy. They hate paying taxes for things they can't control, and right now schools are something beyond their control. They hate listening to ideas and subject matter they can't control (which is why they invented the term "political correctness" and oppose advanced scientific ideas like evolution). Basically they hate the whole notion of "public" anything because it undermines the class system and the privileged station that the wealthy see themselves as entitled to.

So what you'll end up with is education for those who can afford it, hand outs for a few smart poor kids. Vouchers in the name of equality of access or equality of opportunity misstate the objective.

Poison Ivies

A worthwhile suggestion from Malcolm Gladwell: shut down the Ivy league.

It's easy to hate the Ivy League. Also, it's fun.

Yet rarely do hundreds of people cheer wildly as some crazy-haired guy calls for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to be shut down. That's right: closed entirely. Their campuses turned into luxury condos. Their students distributed evenly throughout the colleges of the Big Ten. Their endowments donated to charity, or used to purchase Canada.

The Ivy league is run like the mob. It's run for and by the families who built it, with occasional social promotion for made men. But once you're in, you're in and they take care of their own.

It's the rest of the world, all those Big Ten schools, for example, that carry on naively believing in the meritocracy and education as an opportunity and a step up. Tear down the Ivies, and that might even be true some day.