An interesting analysis done by economist Mark Perry concludes:
Since 1982, women have earned 13 million more college degrees than men.
Let’s drill down on those numbers…
Archive for the ‘Higher Education’ Category
The degree-earning gender gap…
April 9, 2019More: Have colleges watered down their curriculums?
March 28, 2019A survey of 700 schools answers the question.
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In a prior post, we outlined the criteria and method that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) used to assess whether students are learning the “essential skills and knowledge” for work and for life.
In a nutshell, ACTA researchers culled through over 700 schools’ course catalogs and web sites to determine what courses were being offered and, more important, which courses were required of all students.
Specifically, they investigated whether undergraduates are gaining a reasonable college-level introduction in seven core subject areas:
- Composition & argumentation
- Literature and critical thinking
- Foreign language & culture
- U.S. government & history
- Economics: Macro, micro, behavioral
- Mathematics, logic & computer science
- Science & scientific experimentation.
Here’s what they found …
Why are Asian-American students dominating “elite” schools?
March 15, 2019No, they don’t buy-off sports coaches and abuse standardized testing procedures.
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Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ” for short), is a selective DC-area magnet school designed to provide an elite, high-tech education for the most academically gifted students in Northern Virginia.
The school offers rigorous study in advanced college-level offerings like electrodynamics, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence.
High octane academics, for sure … offered to the best and brightest.
What’s the rub?
Demographic mix.
The school’s newly accepted Class of 2022 is 65 percent Asian, 23 percent white, five percent Hispanic, and two percent black.
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20 years ago, the concern was that Black and Hispanic representation at TJ was less than half their demographic mix in Fairfax County – the “feeder” county.
Several initiatives were launched to increase Black and Hispanic representation, including early identification and proactive outreach to high potential minority children; supplementary in-school and extracurricular programs to teach and mentor them; and more ready access to prep and gateway courses such as Algebra.
While undertaking those initiatives, something unexpected happened.
The numbers of Black and Hispanic students applying and enrolled at TJ remained stalled at the pre-initiative levels. So, that’s still a concern.
But, during the same time period (and unrelated to the minority initiatives), the number of white students declined sharply … and the number of Asian-American students has soared.
Why is that?
Part-time nation: Even on college faculties …
July 24, 2014interesting factoid from Quartz.com “ What universities have in common with record labels” …
Used to be that the majority of college faculty were on the tenure track … with less than 1 in 3 being non-tenure track “part-timers”.
Source: Quartz.com
With the cost pressures that universities face these days, those numbers have completely reversed.
Now, the majority of university faculty s part-timers … and about 1 in 3 are on the tenure track.
And, Quartz points out that there’s increasing separation between content producing “marquee” profs and “average” profs.
“The ranks of professors will quickly diverge into the 1% and everyone else.”
As the original Grandma Homa used to say; “It’s easy to be good, hard to be great.”
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