college
You are viewing stuff tagged with college.
You are viewing stuff tagged with college.
Malcolm Gladwell debunks college ranking systems in the New Yorker:
… at a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors. And why? Because a group of magazine analysts in an office building in Washington, D.C., decided twenty years ago to value selctivity over efficacy, to use proxies that scarcely relate to what they’re meant to be proxies for, and to pretend that they can compare a large, diverse, low-cost land-grant university in rural Pennsylvania with a small, expensive, private Jewish university on two campuses in Manhattan.
In this calm before an approaching intellectual storm of more school, I find all the energies of my brain bent on the Big Questions™. I’ve always found it interesting that I only begin to ponder these questions when the day-to-day worries of my life are at a local minima — indeed, the vast majority of folks are just too busy to care. Sadly, I’ll soon rejoin that majority. That reminds me of a piece from a great article (certainly the best item I’ve read about higher education since Nussbaum’s “Cultivating Humanity”) entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” by William Deresiewicz:
My German prof (Professor Paul A. Schons) from freshman year of college has a “German History” mailing list in which, on weekdays during the school year, he sends out historical German facts and current events. He has got to be one of the nicest people I have ever met — sharp witted, too. So, I never unsubscribed to his mailing list… so, four years later, I’m still receiving it. Today, he writes:
Wow, Apple is going through the roof bonkers crazy never seen it before sales with the college crowd. Writes Ars Technica:
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got “it” when you’re so busy that each day slides by in a swirl of homework and exams. When there’s a clear path laid before you, with structured credits and definite milestones, you can fool yourself into living and growing by the academic metric alone. Some are intelligent enough to see beyond the schedule and grow; others, such as myself, blindly follow the rigmarole.
The Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh is, hands down, the greatest educational building I have ever seen.
One of the foremost Gothic architects of the time, Philadelphian Charles Klauder, was hired to design the tower. The design took two years to finish, with the final plan attempting to fuse the idea of a modern skyscraper with the tradition and ideals of Gothic architecture.
… this must be what it’s like to be a COLLEGE GRADUATE!!
Blunt views from ex-college president William M. Chace - This is, hands down, the best, most blunt, most perceptive look at the increasing cost of college, the university-student relationship, and the changing landscape of collegiate life that I have ever read. And it’s only about 18 paragraphs long.
“The Show” continues to impress me - “First off, i’d like to apologize for whoever told you that your degree would be useful. That was irresponsible of them.” - Ze Frank