UC system saw a similar shift in minority enrollment and applications when it lifted AA. Class factors like income and geography should be weighted higher in the wake of letting go general race categories. If you live in an area that had been historically redlined to include an air polluting factory, a prison or industrial manufacturing, give yourself a pat on the back for scoring above average in SATs and high school GPA. It's not like it'd be back breaking for Unis to collaborate on quantifying those factors into a "Zillow-like filter" with point scales. Even it's eventually gamed, at least you'd have hardcore Tiger Moms moving to those areas and uplifting the area along the way. Thanks for the read. I'm sometimes conflicted with my ideals of fairness while pursuing a life that can become exclusionary with the deicsions I make. You can only do so much with charity and volunteer work. I remember an Atlantic article 5+ years ago about how upper middle income families used the extra disposable income to distinguish and elevate their kids such as better neighborhoods, exclusive memberships/lessons, and private school education despite the better neighborhoods. These are all examples of reasonable and rational planning that society encouraged as steps for work harder and lift yourself higher in a competitive society. It wasn't conscious but it created a bubble from lower classes and was used as a means to signal like minded people. Diversity in campuses should remain a priority, but having mixed races from that same social strata isn't the diversity I'm imagining.
THE ELITE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO CAN’T READ BOOKS To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ here is a non-paywalled archived link to the article, should work for everyone https://archive.ph/vcKiO
I just listened to a good podcast about how primary schools have been sold a terrible way to teach reading based off bad research. The academics responsible for this BS made millions selling teaching material. It might be that many of these kids were not taught to read well. Make sure your kids learn phonics. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://revealnews.org/podcast/how-teaching-kids-to-read-went-so-wrong-update-2023/ How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong Many schools teach reading using an approach that can actually make it harder for kids to learn. Kids are taught to use strategies like “look at the picture” and “think of a word that makes sense.” This episode is a partnership with American Public Media’s Sold a Story podcast. October 7, 2023 Credit: Molly Mendoza for Reveal Corinne Adams’ son Charlie came home from school with notes from his teacher saying he was doing great in reading. But during the pandemic, Adams had to give him a reading test at home, and she realized her son couldn’t read. He’d been memorizing books that were read to him, but he didn’t know how to read new words he’d never seen before. So Adams decided to teach him herself. It’s a surprisingly common story. And kids who aren’t on track by the end of first grade are in danger of never becoming good readers. Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers. The problem is even worse when you look beyond the average and focus on specific groups of children: 83% of Black fourth graders don’t read proficiently. American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford digs into a flawed theory that has shaped reading instruction for decades. The theory is that children can learn to read without learning how to sound out words, because there are other strategies they can use to figure out what the words say – strategies like “look at the picture” or “think of a word that makes sense.” But research by cognitive scientists has demonstrated that readers need to know how to sound out words. And some teacher training programs still emphasize the debunked theory, including books and classroom materials that are popular around the world. Scientists say these strategies are teaching children the habits of struggling readers. Kids learn to skip letters and words and struggle to understand what they’re reading. Hanford looks at the work of several authors who are published by the same educational publishing company. One, Lucy Calkins, is a rock star among teachers. Her books and training programs have been wildly popular. Calkins has now decided to rewrite her curriculum in response to “the science of reading.” But other authors are sticking to the idea that children can use other strategies to figure out the words. Their teaching materials are in classrooms all over the country. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2023. Since its release, much has changed. In September, Teachers College at Columbia University announced that the teacher training project founded by Calkins would be “dissolved.” The word “dissolved” was later removed from the statement, and the college instead characterized the move as a “transition” to ensure its “programs are informed by the latest research and evidence.” Calkins is still a professor there. Since Sold a Story was first released, at least 22 states have introduced bills to overhaul reading instruction, and several have banned curricula that include cueing strategies.
The state of higher education (at elite colleges that only .009% of people go to yet result in 95% of prestige media headlines) is the platforming of Nazis and white supremacists in the name of "free speech" and the suppression of those that suggest anything anti Zionist, because the rich ghouls who make up those colleges endowments - which are bigger and more powerful than the university itself, want it that way. The state of higher education for the remaining 99.99% of the country is largely unaffected by most of this ****
grad student unionization claims another victim https://www.ign.com/articles/star-c...d-mark-and-no-there-still-isnt-a-release-date Boston U Suspends Admissions to Humanities and Social Science Ph.D. Programs The university didn’t announce its decision in a news release and hasn’t fully explained it, but two deans blamed a new grad workers’ union contract for the cutbacks to a dozen programs including English, history and sociology. By Ryan Quinn November 19, 2024 On Reddit late last week, a prospective Boston University philosophy Ph.D. student posted a screenshot of an email and expressed confusion. “We have made the difficult decision to suspend admissions for the program you applied to for the upcoming academic year,” the email said. The poster, who used a pseudonym, said he hadn’t even submitted his application and asked his fellow Redditors, “Does anyone else know if BU is not accepting applicants for their philosophy Ph.D. program? Could this be a mistake?” While it remains unclear why a not-yet-applicant received that message, this much is true: BU isn’t accepting new Ph.D. students for the next academic year in a dozen humanities and social sciences programs, including philosophy, English and history. The university didn’t announce this in a news release and has not fully explained the move. In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity, the heads of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), in which all the affected programs are located, pointed to increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strikeended in October. According to an undated post on the university’s website, the programs not accepting Ph.D. students for next academic year are American and New England studies, anthropology, classical studies, English, history, history of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religion, Romance studies, and sociology. The university didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed with interviews Monday. Spokesperson Colin Riley instead sent a university statement that said the decision is “part of our ongoing review of our doctoral programs,” which includes not just completely pausing admissions for some programs, but reducing the number of students in others next academic year. The statement also said “these actions are part of Boston University’s commitment to re-envision these programs to allow for their long-term sustainability. This temporary pause and cohort reduction will ensure BU is able to meet its commitments to currently enrolled students and to set up its future programs for success.” Riley didn’t answer multiple written questions—including on how many applicants are being impacted. And the university statement didn’t mention the graduate workers’ union. But a Nov. 14 email from two arts and sciences deans to lower-level administrators did. In the email, Stan Sclaroff, dean of CAS, and Malika Jeffries-EL, senior associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, referenced the new collective bargaining agreement multiple times as the source of what they called “budgetary implications.” The deans also suggested that the larger university (which last reportedan over $3.1 billion endowment) is leaving the college largely on its own to pay the higher tab. “The provost’s office has agreed to fund the increased costs this fiscal year, including students funded on external grants,” the deans wrote. “Beyond this year, CAS must work within our existing budget to fund this transition in our doctoral programs.” The deans said, “It would be financially unsustainable to move forward with the cohort sizes discussed earlier this fall,” so the college is halting admissions “for all non-grant-funded doctoral programs” next academic year and reducing “cohort sizes of grant-funded programs.” This, they said, “will ensure that we have the financial resources available to honor the five-year funding commitments we have made to our currently enrolled doctoral students.” Sclaroff didn’t respond to a request for an interview, and Jeffries-EL referred Inside Higher Ed’s request to another university spokesperson, Rachel Lapal Cavallario, who didn’t provide comment. An affected department’s chair said in an email that “we’ve been asked to refer media inquiries” to that same spokesperson. The new grad workers’ contract did give Ph.D. students a big raise: They now have a $45,000 minimum annual stipend plus 3 percent annual raises during the three-year collective bargaining agreement. That’s roughly a 70 percent increase for the lowest-paid doctoral students. The university also continues to pay for Ph.D. students’ tuition. But the BU Graduate Workers Union had sought much more in compensation, including $17,000 more in annual stipends for Ph.D. workers. The union also wanted 7 percent annual cost-of-living adjustments or adjustments tied to the median Boston rent increase, whichever was higher. The university continually refused these demands, leading to the longest union-authorized work stoppage among any U.S. college or university employees in at least a decade, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. (Center executive director William A. Herbert has cautioned that his organization doesn’t know the length of some strikes during that period.) Last month, the union ended the strike—accepting a deal that gave it less than it desired. The strike was acrimonious. A spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union Local 509, of which the grad workers’ union is a part, didn’t provide comment or interviews Monday from the union. But the deans’ email, alongside the university’s statement, indicated concerns about the university’s Ph.D. programs that go beyond the new three-year contract. While they didn’t mention the specific outcomes at BU, on a national level, Ph.D. programs have struggled with high attrition rates and questions over whether the degree is worth the investment. more at the link
University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements The school, a bastion of D.E.I., will no longer require the statements in hiring decisions and is considering a broader shift in its policies. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/us/university-of-michigan-dei-diversity-statemements.html
Why are Top Scientists Leaving Harvard? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/why-are-top-scientists-leaving-harvard.html
gift link Professor Amy Wax Sues Penn Over Suspension, Citing ‘Racially Discriminatory’ Policy University has said she failed to provide a fair and equal environment for students https://www.wsj.com/us-news/educati...8?st=vfascS&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/5103555-generative-ai-changes-higher-education/ To short-circuit the higher education AI apocalypse, we must embrace generative AI by Brian Harfe, opinion contributor 01/26/25 8:00 AM ET The rapid improvement of generative AI tools has led many of my peers to proclaim that higher education as we know it has come to a crashing and shocking end. I agree. In my large-enrollment general education course at the University of Florida, I can no longer assign an essay asking students to state their views on genetic engineering and assume the responses I receive are written by humans. So the critical question we must ask as academics is, “What do we do now?” Rather than try to create assignments that AI cannot tackle, I propose we develop assignments that embrace AI text generation. We don’t want to ignore the 54 percent of students who use AI at least weekly in their course assignments, according to the Digital Education Council. We don’t want to ban AI. And even when we, as educators, try to trick AI tools, newer versions of ChatGPT just come along to thwart that strategy. With this in mind, I modified the final assignment in my course to require that students submit an entirely AI-generated first draft, which they then modified to reflect their own perspectives. In the first couple of semesters using this strategy, students color-coded the sources of text to mark which parts were human-generated and which were AI-generated. This strategy allowed students to use and reflect on how they would utilize AI in the future. Tracking of text origin was further streamlined using the recently released “Authorship” tool from Grammarly, which accurately attributes text as “typed by a human” or “copied from a source/AI-generated.” Advancements in technology have upended the careful development of assessments in higher education before and will continue to in the future, even if AI appears to be an all-encompassing, do-everything tool. For those of us born in the 1970s, we remember a time before the ever-present calculator. Math teachers could assign long-division problems without worrying that students who came up with the correct answer did not understand the methods required to generate the answer. More recently, language translation, a key learning tool in language acquisition, was upended over a few days in 2016 by the release of a new version of Google Translate. The rapid improvement in Google Translate bears similar parallels to how ChatGPT 3.5 burst into the consciousness of a large portion of the population in November 2022. In both cases, educators eventually embraced and used these new tools to improve student learning outcomes. While requiring a GenAI first draft of an assignment is not a model that will work in all situations, “showing the work” and student reflection can play key roles in student assessment. My twin high school seniors possess graphing calculators that are more powerful than the computer on which I wrote my dissertation. So I have observed firsthand how educators have modified assessments to adjust for such changes, emphasizing the processes needed to answer the assignment more than the final answer. Language teachers have pivoted to incorporate student reflections on why one word was chosen over another, for example. In my course, Part B of the final assignment requires students to reflect on how well (or poorly) the initial AI draft reflected their views on the assigned topic. I acknowledge that students with access to AI during the reflection portion of assignments could use the tool to show how they produced the “work.” Tools that track AI usage, like the “Authorship” tool, hold promise for providing both instructors and students with information on where and how much AI text was used in an assignment. The capability of AI to generate text (and images) will keep advancing, becoming increasingly integrated into the daily lives of both us and our students. In our professional lives, it will be capable of responding to the most imaginative essay prompts educators can design. By shifting the focus of assignments from pure content creation to critical engagement, analysis and editing, we will teach our students how to think creatively, collaborate and communicate their ideas effectively and responsibly. These are the same skills they need to master to successfully work in teams and communicate efficiently in their future careers. Brian Harfe, Ph.D., is a professor in the College of Medicine and associate provost at the University of Florida. He runs 14 international exchange programs and a study abroad program while teaching about 450 students each semester.
During my college experience, Boomers then lamented the death of pure research in undergrad degrees because google made it easy to nab snippets without reading books heavy enough to kill roaches. Now, it's the death of googling where literary research has been abstracted once again. Assuming we get zerp hallucinations in future models, it doesn't cure garbage in, garbage out. So now ai boosters are talking about Agents or Mixture of Experts as the next abstraction. I firmly believe having a reasoning class llm in your smartphone could combat misinfostandings, but the previous context belies a cat and mouse meta between our monkeybrains and ever increasing scales of complexity and abstraction as we each climb a hockey-puck shaped curve called the Singularity. Critical Thinking will be akin to what Common Sense has become now, a generational perspective (or abstract cliche) that compacts and pressurizes previous generations of pain and wisdom into black gold that fuels the needs and career pressures of that current era. Will there be historical llms that prune and contextualize decades and centuries of fraudulent and suspect data to feed back into the hive mind? China's been clear of what it wants with their LLMs, and their truth aint pretty. If it's a race to the bottom with them for AI supremacy, I'm not sure I want Sam Altman at it's vanguard. Related - Some stuffy boomer Historians talking about history and post truth climate
I don't think it's as easy to teach or encourage good writing anymore. And that is a significant loss.
Here ya go. James Joyce During my college days, Boomers, with their lamentations, bewailed the demise of pure research in undergrad degrees—a death knell tolled by the ease of Google’s snippets, those weightless fragments supplanting tomes hefty enough to crush roaches. And now? The death of Googling itself. Literary inquiry abstracted anew, as AI boosters whisper of Agents and Mixtures of Experts. Yet, amidst this abstraction, a reasoning class LLM in every pocket might combat misunderstandings. Still, the Singularity looms—a curve sharp as a hockey stick—where critical thinking, like common sense before it, compresses generational wisdom into black gold for the fires of new ambitions. Virginia Woolf The Boomers, in their time, mourned the passing of pure research—a quiet death marked by the rise of Google’s ephemeral snippets, so light they could not press down the weight of roaches beneath them. Now we find ourselves adrift again, the art of Googling lost to abstraction. AI whispers promise salvation through Agents and Mixtures of Experts, but I wonder: can a reasoning class LLM in one’s hand truly untangle the complexities? The Singularity rises like a distant wave, and critical thinking becomes an abstraction itself—a relic pressed into the black gold that fuels each era’s restless ambitions. Ernest Hemingway In college, Boomers grumbled about how Google killed real research. They missed the days when books were heavy enough to kill roaches. Now it’s Googling that’s dead. AI’s taken over with its Agents and Mixtures of Experts. A reasoning LLM on your phone might help with bad ideas, but it won’t stop the cat-and-mouse game between us and our own inventions. Critical thinking will turn into another cliché—just like common sense. And if this race to AI supremacy ends with Sam Altman leading us against China’s truth machines? Well, I’m not sure I want to be part of it.
How to Get More Conservatives in Academia Universities’ ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem. https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological
the irony feels heavy here. “How can we do DEI for conservatives” in response to the self claim of dei being anti intelectual nonsense aimed at promoting ideology over education In the name of combating an organic ideological development because it doesn’t favor their own.
again, the goals of DEI are admirable; the tactics folks have used to implement DEI objectives have largely been illegal. There is no such problem for viewpoint diversity. Plus many fields (certainly not all) are belatedly realizing how much of a problem their ideological one-sidedness is. Academia has largely shot itself in the foot on this one and a growing number of administrators and dept heads are coming to understand this.
It’s a rather socially progressive and authoritative take. It reminds of the Jordan Peterson videos on why women are disproportionately under represented in stem fields and over represented in education or nursing, and he made good points to me, why is this something that should receive effort to change? I’m trying to not write it off because I see the benefit from economic equality, but I’ve always had a hard time believing people should actively get involved in re-wiring social issues. It seems like propaganda that is focused on promoting tribalism over organic structures, or any benefits for mankind for that matter.
