Results tagged “higher education”
The US News college ranking issue is out again, with the usual suspects on top and the same chorus of administrators, professors, and think tanks attacking the study's methodology, on the usual grounds -- favoring research-oriented richer institutions, distorting admissions policies for artificial inflation of selectivity and test scores, and ignoring hard-to-measure outcomes of education. Of course, rankings also encourage colleges to address real issues like retention rates and overuse of adjunct faculty. Anyway, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a campaign to boycott the peer rating of other institutions has stalled; participation inched up last year. The methodology of some critics may be no better than the magazine's. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) rates colleges for policies like required survey courses and gives Fs to the three liberal arts colleges rated highest by US News: Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore. Are graduates of those colleges really so ill-educated? Not those I've known. Surveys, like specialized cafeteria courses, may be boring and forgettable or electrifying, but giving them all an A is grade inflation for cultural conservatives.On the public university side, the best piece I've seen on the ratings business appeared last spring in the Michigan Daily, by the student journalist Stephen Ostrowski:
The U.S. News and World Report lists the University as the 26th-best institution of higher education in the country, wedged comfortably between the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, respectively.
Forbes Magazine, meanwhile, listed the University at 161st, right between Lake Forest College and Wisconsin Lutheran College.
In the world of college rankings, neck-breaking double takes abound. But it's the nature of the business that discrepancies exist -- why would Forbes begin ranking schools if its list was going to match up almost exactly with U.S. News, the leading rankings publication? The flip side to that, of course, is how could a dozen different publications differentiate their ranking systems enough to make printing them worthwhile? The trick is widely varying methodologies so that the same qualities that got a university in one publication's top 20 barely warrant a ranking above 200 to another publication.
I'm biased as a former contributor to the US News rankings issue, but I think it (and the competition) should be praised for making information, however imperfect, available. Five years ago, Gregg Easterbrook deflated admissions anxiety in the Atlantic, and US News has pointed to the range of "A+ Schools for B Students." Magazines have done a lot to moderate academic neuroses. Higher education needs more, not fewer, rankings and lists.
(Photo: Flickr User Alotor)
The Boston Globe reports that Harvard's attorneys are -- defensively, they say -- trademarking everything from the letter H (watch out, Sesame Street!) to "The World's Thinking" (watch out, world!):In fairness to Harvard, its name has probably been misused earlier and more notoriously than that of any other American school. While researching another topic I found a century-old magazine exposé of fraudulent dental clinics that included one called Harvard Dental Companies. And a bit later Al Capone's first boss, the gangster Frankie Yale, called his Coney Island bar The Harvard Inn. (Pity he passed up The Skull and Bones.)Most trademark directors at other Ivy League Schools were astounded to hear of the lengths to which Harvard goes.
Yale has only half a dozen trademarks, including the university name and its bulldog mascot leaning on the letter "Y.'' Princeton, too, has only a handful, most of them designs or Latin phrases. Columbia, which has a harder time casting a wide net on trademarks because of the
Columbia Sportswear clothing company, sticks to its name, symbolic crowns, and lion mascot.
As a Harvard alumnus, albeit non-degreed, I respectfully submit a few further trademark candidates:
"Park your car."
"Fight fiercely."
"You can't tell him much."
And my favorite:
"You leave thinking like a lawyer."
(Thanks to Howard Segal for the link!)
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/3632216400/)
Neither my mother nor father had ever graduated from college. My father hadn't gone beyond the 8th grade, and they were determined that I would go to college. I took the entrance exams for Stanford; at that time (this was 1932 and 1933), very few first-class universities required entrance exams. Stanford did; I passed. But it didn't take me long to figure out that, even working part-time and receiving scholarships, I couldn't possibly pay the board, room, and tuition at Stanford, so I came to Cal. That's the only reason I was here. It was the only first-class university in the country that I could afford to go to. What did I pay? Well I lived at home. I paid $52 tuition per year. And for that I am eternally grateful.And he continued:
I hope I am an enlightened rationalist, and to the degree that I am, it came from this university. Surely I went to Harvard, and I've in a sense been educated in all the years after I graduated from formal education, but my basic philosophy, my basic moral standards, my basic ethical values came out of this university. . . .In the demonstrations of the Vietnam Berkeley was divided between liberal and radical factions that turned these values against themselves, bringing their mutual foe, Governor Ronald Reagan, to the fore in national politics. Reading between the lines in the interview, I can sense that McNamara regretted not only the outcome of the war but its effect on his alma mater.
Giant troves of quantitative data were collected, analyzed, disaggregated and reassembled. Plans -- typically on a five-year timetable -- were conceived and then, presumably, executed. He once called the Bank "an innovative, problem-solving mechanism . . . to help fashion a better life for mankind." Nobel Prizes in economics would later be awarded for disproving this mechanistic notion of institutions. But no Nobel was required to understand that rationalism isn't a synonym for reason, much less common sense, or that a planned solution was a workable or desirable solution, or that war or poverty were "problems" in the same sense as, say, a deficit.While Stephens cites McNamara as a cautionary tale for the Obama administration, the risks of unchecked rationality have been all too evident in the last ten years in industries like energy trading, insurance, and banking, staffed by people from places like Berkeley as well as Harvard. Calm deliberation can mask doubtful assumptions. As G.K. Chesterton put it, the madman is not the one who has lost his reason, but he who has lost everything but his reason.
Edward Tenner
